Commissions, consultations, collaborations
"Action Potential s an interactive sculpture that reflects the human body’s neural pathways. The light sequence represents the neural impulses, a cascade of information that travels through the body. The work is informed by the historical influence of glass in scientific innovation and the role of electricity in re-stimulating neural pathways.
The sculpture combines the inert and insulating properties of glass with the conducting properties of copper, used in some electrical interfaces, to augment and enhance the body’s functions. Action Potential is dynamic – viewers are invited to approach the sculpture and activate the light pathways."
This work was made in collaboration with Jeremy Keenan, technician and Devereux & Huskie glassworks.
Action Potential has been on permanent exhibition at the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience, University College London since October 2017
"500+ silicone figures, connected to motors connected by a physical computer and coded in a synchronized motion. The steel undulating landscape is graphed and regimented. A juxtaposition of the scattered, fleshy and imperfect crowd. The sound of the zipping motors creates a visceral physical experience, which corresponds with the slightly ominous movements of the characters.
What they are paying homage to is deliberately left unclear, the only clear narrative is when one bows, the closest to them bows and then so on in a ripple effect. The human-like silicone creates a creepy, mischievous depiction of society and our human frailties, mocked in materiality and context.
As individuals we are continuously decoding the reactions of others to decipher the severity of situations and how we should act, suppressing our own instincts.“Closest Seven” is a recurring theme in my work. I can’t hide from its stark parallelism to the current Pandemic, where my themes of research have literally unfolded."
for Tom Slater:
"Using 3D computer graphics, laser beams and a 16-channel Ambisonic speaker array, Hybrid Spaces interrogates whether or not these three dimensional audiovisual imaging technologies can act as a clear cut barrier separating digital and physical space."
for Graham Ellard:
" FOSSIL focuses on the Royal Academy’s collection of historic architectural casts, copies of antique columns, capitals and friezes. They were once used as teaching aides at the RA Schools. But, since the Architecture School closed in the 1950s, these casts were hidden behind temporary walls.
This film records the precarious revealing of the casts and their ungainly demounting. Their removal was undertaken by hand, using webbing, ropes, pulleys and physical force in much the same way that they were installed in the mid-nineteenth century.
Periods of intense colour punctuate the immersive, large-scale film projection. In these sequences, the casts evoke Jean Painlevé’s eerie underwater films of crustaceans, molluscs and seahorses, or the encrusted shipwrecks in Jacques Cousteau’s early film, Silent World. The casts are re-imagined as ancient life forms, now fossilized, that have been secreted from the walls of the RA Schools Studios...With special thanks to:
Jeremy Keenan for help and expertise in designing and programming the frame driven colour slide controller."
"The test tube could be seen as a symbol of science; used everyday in research laboratories to advance medical science. At the Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Professor Ludovic Vallier’s research team are investigating the ideal conditions necessary to transform stem cells into endoderm cells, constantly refining the growing conditions to optimise cell growth.
Many of these experimental discoveries occur within a test tube. Inspired by Professor Ludovic Vallier’s research. Jenny Walsh conducted a series of experiments to determine the ideal conditions required to alter the test tube shape, creating a colony of cellular shapes at various stages of differentiation."
State of Flux was exhibited at Exchanges, Cambridge in 2017 and State of Flux (detail) will be exhibited at Infinite Potentials 14th June – 14th July 2018, SciArt Centre exhibition at ArtCell, Cambridge in collaboration with Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
8th Sept 2018 - 13th Jan 2019 Infinite Potentials, SciArt Centre exhibition at New York Hall of Science, New York City, in collaboration with the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
"The test tube could be seen as a symbol of science; used everyday in research laboratories to advance medical science. At the Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Professor Ludovic Vallier’s research team are investigating the ideal conditions necessary to transform stem cells into endoderm cells, constantly refining the growing conditions to optimise cell growth.
Many of these experimental discoveries occur within a test tube. Inspired by Professor Ludovic Vallier’s research. Jenny Walsh conducted a series of experiments to determine the ideal conditions required to alter the test tube shape, creating a colony of cellular shapes at various stages of differentiation."
State of Flux was exhibited at Exchanges, Cambridge in 2017 and State of Flux (detail) will be exhibited at Infinite Potentials 14th June – 14th July 2018, SciArt Centre exhibition at ArtCell, Cambridge in collaboration with Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
8th Sept 2018 - 13th Jan 2019 Infinite Potentials, SciArt Centre exhibition at New York Hall of Science, New York City, in collaboration with the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
"Spin glass is inspired by head direction cells, which are brain cells that create our sense of direction. Head direction cells continually map the direction the head is facing as we move around. When the head turns, new head direction cells fire, registering your new direction and linking it to your new perception."
Collaborating with Kate Jeffery, a professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London and Jeremy Keenan, technician. Spin Glass represents a head-direction network that is controlled by the head movements of an exploring mouse. With the animal’s movements, light activity shifts through the network such that the active neurons always signal the direction of the mouse’s head, thus forming its sense of direction.
Spin Glass was recently exhibited at the Cavendish SciArt Exhibition in Cambridge and will be exhibited at FENS Forum of Neuroscience in Berlin on the 7th - 11th July 2018.
The accompanying music was based on a sample produced from rubbed crystal glass, modulated to make notes of different pitch. These notes were then combined to make chords, with each chord matching a direction. Because the sense of direction forms a continuous circle, the chords were formed as a circular scale, enabling the music to continuously and smoothly follow the movements of the head and the activation of the neurons.
"The inspiration for this work initiates from the heartbeat. Just like every one of us has a heartbeat from the moment we are born, it will also cease at the moment of our death. In other words, the heartbeat is actually proof that we are alive. Since our heartbeats are ‘natural’, we tend to ignore them as we go about our daily lives. Or perhaps because our heartbeats are too slight to be noticed, we only tend to notice our rapid heartbeats after intense stimulation. What I’d like to express in my work is that the heart still beats even without stimulation. We are still alive in the world without noticing our hearts beat.
My work consists of two parts. The first part is a performance. A sensor placed over my heart sends the rhythm of my heartbeat to a perforating machine. In turn, this machine punches a hole into a strip of 16mm film. Each 30 minute performance will record on 100ft of film. The second part of the work projects the perforated 16mm film at heart height onto a wall.
This work is inspired by my mother’s death. On her deathbed, as her breathing was shallow, I couldn’t judge whether she was still living or not. I could only tell by feeling her pulse as I held her hand. At that moment I was struck by the symbolic nature of the heartbeats relevance to life; something I myself had taken for granted."
"As Greater London has 23,000 people per square mile, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could become lonely, invisible and forgotten in such a crowded city. Yet loneliness is increasing, as are the social and financial cost of this malaise. Isolated living on the Stonebridge Estate, NW10, typifies the epidemic of loneliness now affecting London and, increasingly, other world cities.
The Stonebridge People Library is a community facility designed for the residents of the Stonebridge Estate. It contains the collected images, stories and aspirations of people who live on and around the Estate. Users can access their neighbours’ library contributions and meet with them at specially designed events.
The aim is to restore a visceral connection among people, to place residents’ collective wealth of knowledge and life experience back in to the community and to inspire, reconnect and change the memory of the area for the Stonebridge Estate’s residents."
for Olan:
interactive audiovisual system
voice controls sound & light
ecstasy & dysphoria
Live at the Barbican
Actress & the London Contemporary Orchestra : Momentum
additional programming : Jeremy Keenan
for Tom Mudd:
“CONTROL is an interactive installation exploring the relationships between artists, music, and musical artifacts. It attempts to call attention to the role that the musical artifacts play in developing musical ideas. A single dial is connected to a single speaker, but the relationship between the two is not fixed; it flits between a range of possibilities composed by a diverse range of artists. Visitors are invited to use the dial to make sounds, and to thus explore the links between their actions, the limits of the dial, and the musical ideas embedded in the software by the artists.”
for Nabil Ahmed:
"The cyclone captured in the Blue Marble image came to stand for the entanglement between natural and political violence in Bangladesh’s war of national liberation, NASA’s Landsat satellite program, the launch of the Green revolution as a neocolonial system of agriculture around the world, as well as a record of how cyclones can return as affect."
Concept: Nabil Ahmed
Sound: Jeremy Keenan
As part of The Whole Earth exhibition, HKW, Berlin, Germany.
Strings is an immersive installation that deals with issues across the fields of craft, textile technologies, sonic art and responsive design. The work is a collaboration between artist Myrto Karanika and Jeremy Keenan. It investigates bidirectional relations within everyday surroundings, focusing on the relationships between space, texture, and bodily expression, attempting to exploit them through a combination of innovative soft technologies and traditional art practices such as weaving, printmaking and embroidery. The artwork focuses on the development of a textile system that enables people to experience an immersive physical environment by using analogies of the human skin and nervous system.
More specifically, the somatosensory system (outer skin, nervous system, brain) is being examined in the context of a responsive artwork, and is translated into a design system (haptic qualities, textile structure, programming). The physical interface is constructed from cotton micro-tulle and a number of conductive threads connected to an Arduino microcontroller, and is layered with a translucent silk organza that has been digitally printed and hand-embroidered with a variety of stitches and materials.
This results in a highly haptic and textured surface, with the conductive threads acting as nerves and the processed organza acting as skin. In this way, Strings simulates a living textile organism that responds to people’s bodily engagement in a tangible, tactile manner. People’s gestural engagements with the textile, interpreted as a series of touched cross-sections of conductive thread, are passed to the Strings software to generate sound according to the performed gestures. Presented at FILE Festival, Brazil, 2010, and Shunt Lounge, 2009 in 4 channel sound.
A collaboration between textile artist Myrto Karanika and sound artist Jeremy Keenan, Peacock explores relations between space and bodily expression through the novel use of technology and traditional art practices such as printmaking, stitching and embroidery. The work creates a sense of continuity that joins ongoing developments in the field of interactive artistic production with the long history of rug making.
Reflecting the textile references Myrto grew up with, Peacock’s pattern is a contemporary take on motifs one frequently comes across in traditional post-Byzantine textile craft. It interprets themes underpinning Greek folk art through the use of bright, bold colours and the depiction of floral and faunal elements that bear a symbolic cultural significance.
The work’s highly multisensory nature asks to be explored through the eyes, the hands, the limbs and the whole of the body; the rug has a transitional quality that creates space within space and signifies a plateau for different types of engagement and qualitative attention.
As different relations between people’s activities form and dissolve over time, they are sonically communicated through an evolving soundscape, the composition of which relies on the technology underlying the tactile sensitivity of the rug. The flow of data generated by people’s physical interaction with Peacock is passed to custom sound software created by Jeremy. As the rug is being walked on, touched, stroked, and pressed, the sound software encodes these gestures on different spatial and temporal scales, continuously generating sonic output that ranges from short, staccato bursts to expansive, harmonic sound fields.
Presented at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania, 2015 in 4 channel sound.
From Honey To Ashes is a performance based electronic music trio consisting of Matt Lewis, Ed Perkins and Jeremy Keenan. The group uses custom software and hardware to create networked improvised performances.
From Honey To Ashes have performed across the UK since 2006, at places like SARC in Belfast and Horse Hospital in London.
An immersive, multi-stage audiovisual installation involving motion tracking, remote instructions to dancers via wireless headphones, and field recordings of domestic activities. Exposing Traces invites an exploration of the hidden world of internal spaces through immersive audio-visual experience. It is an exploration of the commonality between unseen human activities that often occur in close proximity to one another in urban dwellings, and the physical barriers by which they are either perceptually distorted or concealed completely. With Helene Cooper.
Hot licks is a real time mobile sonic art project using live audio input from inside and around an operating ice-cream van. A part of Matt Lewis’ project Mr. Shordy.
Mr. Shordy is a mobile sound project by Matt Lewis in an Ice cream van traveling around the streets of N1 London. The ice-cream van forms an integral backdrop to the British summer. Though not always seen, its familiar chimes form an important presence in local streets.
Foley pit, handheld objects, microphones, video clips, 4 speakers, contact microphones, camera tracking, Max/MSP programming. With Matt Lewis. Exhibited at Shunt Lounge, London, 2008.
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