I work across a range of disciplines to produce creative sonic works. Along the way I incorporate my interests in composition, sound design, creative coding, spatial audio, interactive multimedia and data sonification to widen the scope for collaborations with researchers and arts practitioners.
This is a two-year artist residency with the SETI Institute in California. Beginning on July 15th 2024, this journey has already been both challenging and rewarding. As part of Non Random, I’m excited to collaborate with an extraordinary community of scientists and researchers, expanding the intersection of art and science in our exploration of the unknown. Our residency kicked off with workshops inspired by our previous project, Evolving Ourselves with Unnatural Selection, which culminated in the creation of the GAIA project. GAIA explored the ethical implications of genetic editing for climate adaptation, offering an interactive and immersive art space that examined the altering of species—human and non-human—for survival in extreme climates, the resurrection of extinct species, and the preparation of life for space travel. At SETI, we’ve adapted these themes to initiate dialogues with researchers investigating the potential for intelligent life beyond Earth. Our discussions focus on how planets might endure extreme climate transformations and the ways in which life could exist in such conditions. These conversations have real-world implications, particularly in understanding how Earth might adapt to a global climate shift..
This is a SciArt project funded by Creative Scotalnd and supported by our research collaborators from ECA (Edinburgh College of Art), IGC (INSTITUTE OF GENETICS AND CANCER) and Malcolm White of St. Andrews exploring CRISPR-cas9 technology. Incorporating the language of geneticists, scientists, technologists and the lingua franca of popular media (i.e., mutation, germ-line, mutant, freak, deviation, abnormality, deformity), we will develop a database of words. These will be presented as an audiovisual artwork, assembled and disassembled using a genetic algorithm that simulates the process of future generations of ‘beings’ that are the result of CRISPR editing interventions. Using a pilot project developed from an R&D phase, we will approach exhibition spaces to propose the development of larger scale artworks for installation. This project has potential for REFable outcomes.
This was an Arts Council of England funded SciArt project (born from my discussions with Sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski). An art-science collaboration between visual and sonic artists and academics from astrophysics, computer science, humanities and social sciences. It took as its focus the self-organising powers of planetary rings (such as those around Saturn) as researched by astrophysicists, to examine the question of self organisation over deep time. It involved modelling self-organising systems of planetary rings (based on actual physics and the informed by the Cassini mission), and finding ways to present these dynamics visually and sonically for diverse audiences, and using this to creatively stretch people’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and intelligence. I created the sound design and spatialisation for this modelled system which was presented over a 44 channel array at HKW in Berlin Germany and an 8 channel version at the FoN (Full of Noise Festival) in Barrow-In-Furness. There will be further output from this project in the form of a tour involving myself and the visual artist (Ashley Jame Brown) as we continue to develop our live coding performance of this material.
The emergence of the field of acoustic ecology has led to a significant number of findings framed within an audible methodology, that is, recording and analysing the sounds produced in particular environments and the impact these sounds have on a natural ecosystem. I have been working since 2016 with the sound artist Linda O Keeffe on a project examining the impact of emerging renewable technologies on rural landscapes and local communities. In July 2015, O Keeffe and I travelled to Spain to record the vast wind farms of the Terra Alta region of Northern Spain. In 2016 we created an acoustic ecology residency located in the village of La Fatarella and selected two artists to attend. As a result of this research we have developed a number of workshops and were commissioned to develop a performance work for World Dawn Chorus Day in 2018 by Full of Noise in Barrow and Furness. Aspects of my contribution to this project have been published in journals and book chapters. I am now working in collaboration with O Keeffe and researchers in the Geosciences at UoE to develop a bid for UKRI's Climate Resilience Call. This project will build on the work developed by myself and O Keeffe over the past three years, but with a focus on using Arts based approaches with communities intertwined with participatory approaches to identify cultural value for climate risk assessments.
‘On Prediction of Auditory Height in Ambisonics’, Gavin Kearney and Tony Doyle, 3rd International Conference on Spatial Audio, Graz, September 2015.
‘A Virtual Loudspeaker Database for Ambisonics Research’, Gavin Kearney and Tony Doyle, 3rd International Conference on Spatial Audio, Graz, Austria 2015.
‘A HRTF Database for Virtual Loudspeaker Rendering’, Gavin Kearney and Tony Doyle, 139th International Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, New York, October 2015.
‘Height Perception in Ambisonic Based Binaural Decoding’, Gavin Kearney and Tony Doyle, 139th International Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, New York, October 2015.