Lilium is a post-digital cine-symphonic mural that re-imagines urban regeneration by drawing citizens into a laneway transformed into a spatial soundscape and a cinematic mural that depicts a supernatural world inhabited by playful and energetic hybrid species. Overlooked cycles of life and death are expressed through disparate temporalities – generative sound and photographic compositions of human figures and decaying flora emerge, bloom, procreate, decay, and re-incarnate.
Lilium offers an aesthetic reflection on the nature of decay and architecture of the city to prompt the questioning of natural life cycles. A dialogic exchange between citizens, place, space and events is fused into an experience of the mind to open a possibility for existence through ourselves and our changed perceptions of being that might free the imagination from the city's functional and technical limitations. The existential image and soundscape are explored through Pallasmaa's 'lived space' – integrated with imagination, thoughts, emotions, dreams, the unconscious, memories of the past, and present experiences. According to Juhani Pallasmaa, the structures of music and cinema can be used to express the essence of temporal and spatial experience. Pallasmaa argued for dialectical combinations of external and inner mental space rather than independent boundaries of physics and time.
I first created the imagery of these lilies for Underworld's single Bird 1 – for their 30th Anniversary album album Barking, before remixing it for Lilium.
Lilium was exhibited in the inaugural Big City Lights Festival in July 2022. The immersive ambisonic soundscape was created by John Furguson and Andrew R. Brown.
A documentary about this project was peer reviewed by AMPS 2023 (Architecture Media Politics Society), a conference that foregrounds the intersection of History, Art, Design, Architecture and Film. The documentary won the AMPS YouTube Channel Award 2022 for excellence in scholarship and has been permanently archived on the AMPS Academic YouTube channel, which can be seen here.
TVC / chromatography & timelapse photography / client BBC / commissioned by Red Bee Media & Tomato.
Paper chromatography is the process used to animate the typography. Black ink dissolves in water which carries it through the paper via capillary action. Distinguishable by their variety of colour, the separate compounds within the ink separate and travel through the cellulose base at differing rates.
Code / animated photography / client Wired UK / commissioned by Wired.
A symbiotic relationship exists between sound and image.
The moving image is created by sampling pixels of the still life photographs of audio output components, then re-organising their spatial co-ordinates in a virtual three dimensional workspace. Electronic sound is generated by sampling the colour, tonal and spatial data values of the images. Those values are used to create a histogram which synthesises the spectrum of an audio signal waveform which in turn reorientates the x, y and z co-ordinates of the extracted pixels. New frames are created from each original frame and are then linearly sequenced.
Communing with robots is interested in notions of trust and privacy in the Smart City and the Internet of Things (IoT) –specifically, how an individual’s sense of agency might be affected in cities increasingly mediated by information communications technologies empowered by AI.
When I made Communing with robots in 2022, this was a relatively obscure thing to do. However, a year later, there was an estimated 100 million monthly active users of ChatGPT-3.5 – the 'fastest-growing consumer application in history’ (Hu 2023) – just two months after its launch. This represents the hyper-speed at which Silicone Valley techno-monopolies are now able to capture everyday social and mental experiences of global populations and transform them into a capital commodity and immense wealth–tax free.
Communing with robots uses satire to provide cathartic relief to the pervasive use of AIs and the rhetoric and surrounding them, in everyday life through a playful civic hack using generative artificial intelligence models. It was exhibited at Curiocity as an installation for The World Science Festival 2022, in the South Bank Parklands to provide citizens with a space to reflect and contemplate existence in the hyper-networked city by proposing a slightly subversive creative transformation of a tiny part of the public sphere.
Communing with robots asks: what will human agency mean when centralised artificial intelligence mediates our experience of public and private life? Will anonymity, privacy and trust be possible in a world where AI ‘knows’ you better than you know yourself? (Queensland Museum Network 2022)
The kinetic text is robotic fiction, AI poetry generated by the GPT-2 algorithm that uses nucleus sampling to search neural networks on the internet. GPT-2 scrapes and remixes data from web sources including news, fiction, songs, poems, films, recipes, code, and HTML. The diverse and often bizarre references to fictional characters and situations are strangely beautiful. With childlike innocence, poetry emerges from GPT-2’s non-human choice of words and the glitchy AI voice overs made using gen-AI audio tools. The coloured imagery is pseudo-surveillance imagery created in and around the South Bank Parklands where the installation was placed during the World Science Festival, Brisbane 2022.
Void is a projected image installation and a visual model that was created to study the relationships between the photographic image and computational thinking. This line of thought, used to decompose problems by identifying variables to form generalisations or abstractions, is based on the fatalistic assumption that the more information that we have about the world the more control we may have over it.
The work was included in the exhibition Strategies for the Future at the C3 Contemporary Art Space at the Abbotsford Convent Foundation.
Sunpath data visualisation: Andrew Marsh
Spoken word: Fiona Jeanne Grisard
With the great folks at Guerrilla, I made this identity collateral for the Bleach* Festival 2016, the annual multi-arts festival of the Gold Coast which aims to connect art with the community through the expression of music, theatre, dance, visual arts and outdoor events.
A wonderful gift to the City of The Gold Coast !
The development process, as with most of my work, was born of intuitive experimentation. The identities, GIFs, and banners used for the Bleach* Festival 2016 idents are derivatives. They were meticulously extracted from the results of a spontaneous studio exercise. Projected imagery of 2D vector graphics and 3D animations were mapped onto the human subject and a sequenced into the video file (bottom). The sound, made by my dear and generous friends from FASE (an art+design collective in Buenos Aires) was used in the video timeline to create the visuals’ responsive temporality, and imbue the imagery with its electro-glitch-rhythm and mood.
Highspeed macro imagery / hydrogen 2 + oxygen 1 / a concept for an interactive data visualisation
Water is created through the formation of stars and has been in existence for as long as the Universe. In it’s liquid, gaseous or solid forms it is vital to every life form on Earth. Spiritually and philosophically it is considered a purifier. Physically, for the most part, it is what we are.
A single channel projected video installation, BARI16 Festival, Spring Hill Baths. The projected video installation and performance at the Spring Hill Baths aimed to open a local audience to an immersive experience of h2o from within a pool as an all-encompassing reflected image, augmented by a responsive live musical improvisation by cellist Linda Hwang. The still imagery was exhibited in the group show Plenty at the Brisbane Powerhouse, from the September 27 to the October 23, 2016.
Feeding Frank is an exploration of the systematic effects of ubiquitous computing and screen surfaces on the daily human experience. Frank (my daughter’s fish) is a metaphor for the choices–or the lack thereof–in how we organise ourselves within these systems.
The video installation shown here was made for Emporium South Bank, ‘Australia's Leading Boutique Hotel’ (2018 World Travel Awards). Shot entirely on my phone, Frank’s ‘world’ was composited for Emporium’s bespoke LED screens including an 18-metre porte-cochère screen and their spectacular mirrored elevator experience.
Check out the video of the kaleidoscopic elevator pitch at the bottom of this page!
In collaboration with Guerrilla, I creatively directed, produced, photographed and post-produced these identity portraits for the Bleach* Festival 2018 Program and media collateral. See the backstory here.
Custom code / 360 º motion capture / animated photography.
Inspired by the organic beauty of the Phalaenopsis Blossom (orchid) and the design philosophy of Scandinavian collective Muuto.
Jakob Wagner's Flow Milk Jug and the blossoms are photographed in a 360º range of rotation, creating a three dimensionally mapped image sequence. The data is encoded and re-sampled. In effect, the object can be unwrapped and spread across a two dimensional horizontal plane. Time is spatially compressed from it's multi-dimensional and temporal nature.
muutos : noun - change, modification, new perspective.
Eyecanfly is the research and prototype for an immersive virtual flight experience using stereoscopic 3D photography, micro drones and virtual reality. I presented the work at EVA 2013 (the Electronic Visual Arts conference) at The British Computer Society.
A BIG thanks to Captain 3D and all of those who bravely took part in the user-testing sessions.
An experiment in form, Halcyon is a visual metaphor for the excessive commodification and dominance of the natural world through socio-technical means which dangerously distorts reality at the expense of its creatures–including humans–and their connection to each other.
Exhibited in London 2011, Brisbane & Philadelphia 2015
Awards Best In Category, Commissioned Design Series, The Photographers Awards 2011
UHD Digital OOH / in-store installations / online / print / digital facades / client UNIQLO.
D&AD 2014 Award / In-Book Branding, Brand Experience & Environments
A challenging multi-platform project, with the team spread across the globe in London, Paris, New York, Barcelona and Tokyo. My delivery involved creating the visuals and a design management solution to the complex workflow, from pre-production and production, through to post-production.
The LED installations went up in the flagship store on 5th Avenue, and the SoHo, West 34th St, Paris and London stores.
In NYC at the time, I popped by to document the installation process.
In collaboration with Guerrilla, and some fabulously talented performing artists I creatively directed, produced, photographed and post-produced this identity collateral for the Bleach* Festival 2017.
Australian Marketing Institute – Awards for Marketing Excellence / Not for Profit Marketing Award. See the backstory here .
Silver gelatine prints, 6 in a series of 24, 142cm wide a variable heights.
To remove the lens is to see without eyes.
Lenses create distorted representations of three dimensional scenes by rendering them onto two dimensional surfaces. The vanishing point provides us with a point of reference, useful for spatial perception and for understanding our relationship with the environment. However, this phenomenon doesn't exist other than as a proxy for how we translate perception into representations of what we believe to be real.
Greenpeace / Arctic Global Day of Action / outdoor projection mapping / commissioned by Greenpeace UK / curated and edited by Immersive.
A global movement to stop the largest companies in the world from destroying the Arctic for profit.
I created a short piece, briefed with the keyword of 'hope' to map to the facade of Friends House, the office of Quakers in Britain. Other contributing animators were Jordan Foster, Chris Stoneman, Matt King, Tom Wall, Bruno Costarelli, Sipos Mihály, Daero Ra, Clive Shaw, Daniel Wiedemann, Alexander Andrew Boyce, Sunghwoa Gong.
2014 News flash, from Nic and all the Arctic defenders at Greenpeace UK...
"Prepare yourself for some BIG news".
"Shell’s new boss, Ben van Beurden, has scrapped Shell’s 2014 Arctic drilling plans".
"This is a major result for everyone who has fought for the Arctic and presents a huge opportunity to protect the Arctic for good".
"Right now, Van Beurden is deciding Shell’s strategy for the future, and he’s under a lot of pressure to make some big changes".
"Just two weeks ago, in the face of falling profits, Shell had to release its first profit warning in ten years. And thanks to a broad range of environmental groups, a US court ruled that Shell couldn’t drill in Alaska this year".
"Investors are really nervous, and vast amounts of money have been wasted on fines, leases and equipment. Shell’s $5 billion Arctic experiment has been a failure".
Send an urgent message to Shell’s new CEO telling him to rethink these reckless Arctic plans.
"Ten years ago, when Shell first decided to gamble on oil in the melting Arctic Ocean it might have looked like a good investment. Fast forward to 2014 and Shell have nothing to show except financial loss and reputational disaster. The world has changed and big oil is not the future".
"It’s time to move on. Let’s make it happen".
In the face of nature's overwhelming dominance, living can be a process of ritualistically basic activity.
At great altitudes and in some of the most isolated regions of the Argentine and Chilean Andes - often only accessible by air, horse or all terrain vehicles - people tell stories of great tribulation. Their meagre possessions are those of need, utilitarian and transportable. The extremes in temperatures, blisteringly cold winds and the continuous lightning storms that blast at the earth's surface have shaped their lives. One might wonder at how and why these locations were chosen for founding their communities.
Large format analogue photography / C-type and silver gelatine prints / 6 in a series of 35.
Adidas Germany / Content for Interactive wall installation for flagship retail store in Berlin.
This collaborative piece draws upon the life and work of Edweard Muybridge's human motion studies and stop frame animations.
Each frame is of UHD resolution suitable for multi-platform usage from large format print and digital OOH to online and mobile.
Argentina is a land of seemingly infinite wealth and possibilities, the land of milk and honey. As rich as an Argentine was a common turn of phrase used throughout the early 20th century. During the 1940s food commodity exports totaled more than any other nation in the world, including the United states.
These abandoned salons have transcended the decades since 1914. Evita Peron, Argentina's icon to the poor and working classes, would spend small fortunes here indulging herself, preening on the marble stair cases and dancing upon the mahogany parquetry floors. Now, much like herself, the intricate detailing lies buried beneath the stories and the dust.
35mm analogue photography / giclee prints / 6 in a series of 16.
I captured these portraits of audience members during the live performance of Calling Home, a celebration that brought together people of all ages, faiths and traditions at HOTA (Home of the Arts) on the Gold Coast.
The portraits accompanied Yirmal’s touching finale performance of Spirit of Place. Yirrmal is a Yolngu man from the community of Yirrkala in North-East Arnhem Land. He is related to Geoffery Gurrumul Yunupingu on his mother’s side and his father, Witiyana Marika, was a singer and dancer in Yothu Yindi.
Director - Benjamin Knapton
Musical direction: Gordon Hamilton
Musical arrangements: William Barton, Camerata (Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra) and The Australian Voices
Commissioned by: Natalie Lidgerwood, Senior Programmer, HOTA
Published: See the hyperimagery on Facebook
In collaboration with Bleached Arts and Guerrilla and Legs on the Wall, I creatively directed this piece for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation’s (GOLDOC) One Year to Go Community Celebration on the The Gold Coast.
Conceived of on a napkin, over a breakfast meeting on the beach at Burleigh, we had a lead and delivery time of only 2 weeks. In true 8-bit style, the directors cut includes sharks, alligators and alien invaders.
GOLDOC describes the work as “a gravity defying light projection show that will light up the night with a taste of the sports on offer at GC2018”.
Concept & Creative Direction: Peter Thiedeke
Animation and design: Todd Clausen @ Guerrilla Digital
Projection: www.ikonix.net.au
Client: Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation GOLDOC