Listen (2023)
Hebden Bridge Arts Festival
Digital collage, projection mapping, sound art, Max/MSP/Jitter
‘Listen’ is an exploration of the quickly changing balance of the sounds of the natural world. I worked with GCSE art students from Rastrick High School, who each created a piece of sound art responding to the local landscape, taking inspiration from the natural environment around the Calder Valley, sound walks around the school, and the work of sound artists R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Delia Derbyshire.I designed and built a wooden model responding to the sounds the young people had used in their pieces, and created video collages responding to each, which were then projection mapped onto the model.
Asthir Gehrayee (2023)
FutureEverything and BeFantasticMax, A/V installation, sound
An immersive, interactive, audiovisual digital art installation, inspired by the ocean and its more-than-human inhabitants, plankton. The title translated from Hindi to English means ‘unstable depths’, and this installation invites the audience to plunge into the depths with us and make a bodily wish for ocean healing.
I was responsible for the sound design and interactivity of the project. We tracked the audience’s faces using Max, and if they moved in coordination, the visuals and sound came to life, encouraging users to move together which each other and with the plankton. The final piece was displayed at Bangalore FutureFantastic festival.
Asthir Gehrayee was developed during Be Fantastic Within Fellowship Program and was funded by The British Council.With thanks to researchers Dr Claire Widdecomb, plankton ecologist, Dr Lee de Mora, Marine ecosystem modeller, Jonathan Sharples, Professor of Ocean Sciences, and Dr Shubha Sathyendranath, marine remote sensing scientist.Asthir Gehrayee was realised in collaboration with Monica Hirano, a performance artist from Brazil, Jaime Jackson, a visual, digital and socially engaged artist based in the UK; Irini Kalaitzidi, a choreographer and computational artist from Greece, and also based in the UK; and Sayli Kulkarni a dancer and a movement artist from and based in India.
You can download the code for Asthir Gehrayee here
An Unconventional Legend (2022)
Castlefield Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Art Assembly
Zapworks, Blender, installation
I worked with Manchester Secondary PRU and Raheel Khan over a series of workshops to help the young people write a story, design maps, and make paintings, all of which were brought together to create an augmented reality installation. Scanning the QR code allows viewers to see the map come to life through augmented reality technology and hear the young peoples’ story narrated by them. This project was realised using a combination of Zapworks, Blender and Photoshop, and displayed in Manchester Art Gallery.Commissioned by Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth, and The Manchester College for Art Assembly 2022, Manchester, and with Manchester Secondary PRU. The project was funded and supported by Art Fund, the Granada Foundation and Manchester City Council's Our Year 2022.
Interactive Poetry Installations
Manchester Poetry Festival and FutureEverything (2021)Processing, Kinect, installation
These two pieces were a collaboration with writer Charlotte Wetton, and were commissioned by Future Everything and The Writing Squad for Manchester City of Literature’s Festival of Libraries. Charlotte wrote two poems celebrating the role of libraries and librarians, and I realised these poems as interactive installations.
I created some software that would track the movements of passers-by using an infrared camera, and reshape the poem into the shape of their movements. We were very lucky to have both poems hosted in the windows of Manchester Central Library.
Autodidact
This poem was a tribute to the many many people who teach themselves new skills in libraries, and the libraries that allow this to happen. This poem took input from a Kinect camera and reformed the poem to fit the shape of whoever is reading it.
The Librarian Conducts A Reference Interview
This poem told the story of a young library patron being guided towards a book that might suit their purposes by a librarian in a dramatic fashion.As people, trams, and animals moved by, a camera tracked their motion and used this movement to ‘push’ the lines to the left and right.
Rain Box (2019)
Manchester International FestivalMax, Ableton, livestream
I was a participant in MIF’s Creative Labs programme. This was an intensive artist development programme as part of 2019’s Manchester International Festival designed to develop digital skills. We were all commissioned to create a response to the festival. I created a music box which could sense rainfall. Every time a rain drop struck the box, it played a bell sound and the voice of a Manchester resident, creating a rain-responsive piece of sound art. This was then live-streamed over the duration of the festival.I later extended this to be a Max For Live device, enabling music producers to use live weather data to control parameters of their music.
Chromesthesia (2018-present)
Max, viola/guitar/string quartet/baroque ensemble, lights
Chromesthesia is an ongoing project using technology I’ve built which converts sound into coloured light, live in real time.
I first presented this publicly as “Seeing Sounds: A Chromesthesia Concert” at Manchester Science Festival in 2018.
This was a sold-out show in Chetham’s Carole Nash Hall, which aimed to directly visualise the experience of having chromesthesia, a neurological condition which causes people to see sounds and music as colours in front of their eyes. The show was part musical concert, part science communication – a string quartet performed four pieces of music, directly visualised by new technology which I developed, which analyses audio and outputs it as coloured light. You can view a short documentary about the project here.Since then, I have also used this piece in performance with several ensembles, including baroque chamber ensemble Improviso.
