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♫ bfdt2.mp3


When a tweet is deleted, it leaves behind an eighteen digit code, an imprint of a thought or feeling. That number could be considered a sequencer, a data string which when fed through an algorithm becomes a soundscape.

Captured from the live twitter stream, the audible output is dictated by what is being removed from the internet at that very moment in time to produce a very public creation of something intended to be obscured, undertaking a process of creation from the act of deletion, a process of revealing through the act of concealment as it algorithmically creates an almost musical score from digital debris.

As the machine plays back its composition at a low frequency, the audio can be felt as well as heard, reconfiguring the normally latent digital stream into an unescapable presence.

Shortlisted for MullenLowe NOVA Award, After Prize and Blooom Award by Warsteiner

Featured on:
Vice: The Creators Project
The Delights and Dangers of Digital
MozFest 2016
fadMagazine

Speakers, computer, deleted Tweets
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“What if things could speak? What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and we just don’t hear them?” asked Hito Steyerl.

‘What Language The Fox’ is the continued development of an on-going project where each iteration of this sound and sculpture installation is specific to its site - constructed from and in response to the environment it is present in.

Critical to its success is an act of looking, a process of exploration, both in the macro and the micro - it cannot exist without the location it is installed in.

By exploring, searching for the over-looked or obvious, taking note of what is hidden in plain view, patterns reveal themselves. These patterns can be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing data to be extracted. This process of revealing something that is hidden or simply not there provides imagined information to a bespoke algorithm, allowing it to form something this data isn’t or wasn’t intended to be and present a new way of understanding something familiar, moulding from it a strange language which then addresses the area from which the data was collected.

This voice is of is the place itself or at least, something very specific to the place.

This process of data collection has been undertaken both by the artist and as a public activity. For example, at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, data was collected from barbed wire surrounding nearby fields, at Sluice in Hackney, from the disused garages around the gallery while at Sanctuary Lab and Central Saint Martins participants were tasked to find data on their own terms before interpreting this to create artworks.

Listed for the Blooom Award by Warsteiner

Speakers, computer, barbed wire





♫ HowToDustTheSurface_Warrington.mp3


‘How To Dust The Surface’, a site specific sculptural sound piece commissioned by Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival and shown in a duo show with Juan Covelli.

A strange dadaist almost poetry emerges as the machine tries to make input tailored for machines into something understandable for humans.

Beginning with a tentative exploration of Warrington Art Museum’s catalogue as a source of data, a number of items whose location had been marked as ‘unknown’ found within the first couple of years of the museum’s donor book, 1848 and 1849, the predecessor of the museum’s accession register, caught my attention. These are items where the description is too vague to identify the specific specimen, or when there are multiple specimens and it’s not possible to identify which is which or it’s suspected that the object is no longer extant.

Referring to the classification system of Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the ID number relating to the concept of each item was noted and this, when combined with the Warrington Museum Index Key, create the data with which to work.

A piece of bespoke software was then used to generate phonemic text from this data source, and when read through by a speech synthesiser, a strange almost language emerges from the jumble of numbers.

Passing this through voice recognition software yields unexpected results as the artificial intelligence behind these pieces of software attempts to make sense of what is being spoken. By repeating the process using two different transcription applications, often vastly different outcomes are achieved. These two outcomes are played simultaneously by the installation.

Sections of a field recording made in the gallery space during the production of the piece play alongside the speech.

Passing information between the almost universal languages of AAT, Java and English the two voices are the twins of similarity and difference – both come from the same conception but each is different. Both speak of the rectangle – the shape of man, an unnatural shape of imposed order – the shape of the frame, the gallery and that of the institution. The rectangles of the speakers call out from and to the institution to locate what is unknown, what is outside the system.

Made possible only with the knowledge and expertise of Craig Sherwood.


Speakers, computer, wires, data, dust sheet

♫ yiwom-Audio-short.mp3


Instigated as a noisy witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves, to ourselves, in real-time.

By manipulating data it is possible to create aspects of uncertainty from the usually reassuring definite of binary data. Data intended to be interpreted as image can be treated as if it were a sound, text treated as a 3D model. It is possible to create something from a binary data source that is not itself binary, it can be more than simply nothing (undefined) or its original file format and take shape in surprising fashions.

A real-time, ever changing sculpture moulded by a snapshot of both the present and near past, interpreted as a series of monotone symphonies.

Listed for Lumen Prize 2015.

Speaker, computer, wires, Twitter
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PoW! is an algorithm – an algorithm that grabs a single Bitcoin transaction as it passes through the Blockchain and moulds the data into a tangible shape that doesn't physically exist.

If a Bitcoin is itself a 'proof-of-work', a piece of data which is difficult (costly and time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify, that then makes each inclination of PoW! a proof-of-work of a proof-of-work – by taking the result of a 'proof-of-work' from the Blockchain, the algorithm behind PoW! passes a 3D model to a rendering application which has to work hard to produce what we can easily see.




3D render, Bitcoin transaction