Psychedelia comes up a lot to describe my work but I think I just like to transmit feelings of awe and wonder. Irrespective of the medium -whether I’m making an installation, a video, or an interactive experience- I like to create otherworldly spaces that invite you in. I’m interested in translating invisible things (sound, data, abstract concepts) into visible things, with the aesthetics of mathematics and chaos.

I was really into MTV’s 120 minutes and Specialten Magazine that came with a DVD full of wild videos and I spent a lot of time on the internet also. I started making weird animations when I was 13 or 14 and went on to study traditional animation and interactive media at university but I didn’t start making digital art until 5 years after I graduated. Some friends of mine in the music industry asked if I could make some low-budget music videos which turned into new opportunities which turned into commercial jobs which meant I could leave full-time work and go freelance.
I think it was drilled into my head that I had to follow a more conventional path so I tried working in the public sector and in advertising before accidentally ending up here.

I now see my freelance work and the work I do for myself as two separate things, whereas I used to think they were bound together. I think my career as an artist has been disrupted a lot by spirit-crushing commercial work that I had to say yes to so I could afford to live in London. Since I moved to Spain three years ago a lot of that pressure has been lifted and I’m more in control of my time but the conflict is that a lot of my inspiration comes from seeing new places, travelling, real-life experiences, and I had more of that in London. Right now, I think I’m still in between those two stages and not settled yet. It’s like I’m just now realising I have more freedom and I don’t know if it’s because of the pandemic but it’s taking a while.

Dateagle Art (Vanessa and Martin) got in touch with me in January 2020 about contributing to their annual group exhibition Control the Virus 03. I had been wanting to do a data visualisation project for a long time and I’m fascinated with Space Weather in general and how life begins and ends with the Sun. The main aim of the project was to create an aesthetic language that goes beyond the way we visualise scientific and or astronomical information: a visceral way of interpreting space weather, rather than an educational one (though I spoke to astrophysicists at the ESA and the Leiden Observatory to make sure my interpretation of the data wasn’t wildly off).
After I’d proposed it I had to figure out how to do it. I had a load of limitations: it had to update in real-time from six different databases, it had to be accessible online, it couldn’t be as intricate as my offline work, it had to look the same on mobile, it had to be quick to load. So, I ended up deciding on a node-based visual programming web tool called Cables.gl because it was so intuitive, with a really helpful community and took the pressure off of finding someone to code it from the ground up. It took me almost a year, but I did it.
I see a lot of my work as data visualisation in some sense, whether using the elements of audio broken down into frequencies, pitch and amplitude to drive real-time live visuals or a wider more artistic interpretation of text used to inform an artwork.
In the case of Heliocene, the uninterrupted stream of data is thanks to Open Data, an amazing and necessary initiative, made available by Space Weather Prediction Centre. I would like to do this again with Venus or Mars maybe.

I’ve always thought that the introspection is down to the viewer and have been reluctant to share what an artwork means, mostly because it’s not immediately apparent for me. With I believe you into being, I got around this by starting with an AI poem I generated with GPT-2 to create a text I could use as a backbone to the accompanying visuals. I’ve used this approach before with random text generators but GPT-2 allowed me to feed the AI prompts to keep it on topic. I cherry-picked the lines that sparked an image or that added colour to the world I wanted to build, without editing too much and keeping a lot of the unusual turns of phrase that make the voice nonhuman. I began the project with a few themes I wanted to explore visually - emergence, chaos, cellular automata - and the ‘great reflection behind it’ wrote itself, I think.

Chaos underpins our universe and all its beauty. It is unpredictable, noisy and imperfect. I wanted the approach to the project to also be those things, and to inform each stage of the process. Each of the lines of the poem was picked because of the visual it invokes. I use the text like raw data to inform the trajectory of the visual, like bounds that contain the conceptual possibilities. To create the visuals I also used different generative and AI imaging approaches, forming mixed media collages with techniques that are usually used singularly. The best way to put it is I just see what I want to create in my head; then I try my best to make it a reality.

I think all art inevitably means something, whether it be intentionally or subconsciously. In my case, I think it's probably more the latter and I find the process of identifying the meaning quite difficult sometimes. I don't consider the meaning literally when I create a piece of work. The aesthetics come first because that's the way I communicate.

I started working with Lava Art Project (Belinda Martin and Paula Ramos) a few months ago and they kindly invited me to take part. I’m not sure I’d say it defines me, but they’re the two places I tend to show work and I like the juxtaposition of enjoying art and enjoying music as for me they’re interchangeable.

I have contributed a short video loop called A Garden for your TV - using CLIP Image Captioning and GPT-3 to create meaning and a title for a work that was created solely for aesthetics. The video is a seamlessly looping never-ending scroll through abstract vines in a dark digital forest with the distorted sound of birds in the background. The AI that analysed it determined it was a sad piece that depicts a ‘lost soul crying in the rainforest’ and ‘the concept of one’s joy in life dying out.’

It’s been fairly mixed. I was invited to Foundation when it launched (by the legends Sara Ludy and Lindsay Howard) but I was a little uncomfortable with the amount of self-promotion and explaining you had to do to sell your art as this doesn’t come naturally to me. Some of my NFTs sell and it’s really cool when it happens. However, I am mostly enjoying being a lurker and watching the culture evolve.

Foundation takes 15% of all sales, which is a little too much in my opinion, but at least it’s not masquerading as a company that’s trying to change the world. There are plenty of other alternatives that allow you to mint on cheaper and faster blockchains, but even if the ethos of those platforms puts artists front and centre, at the end of the day you’ll never actually know their true intentions. Although these platforms will only do well commercially in the long-term if the artists are happy.
To draw a comparison to the music industry, there’s always been a way for musicians to sell their work, such as physical records, digital mp3s, merch and live shows etc., whereas this hasn’t been the case for digital artists. The majority of us either get commercial jobs or we share our work for free on social media hoping that it gets us commercial jobs. Now there’s another avenue that’s opened up to support digital art (whether that’s the intended outcome or not, no one will ever know) that will hopefully evolve to be more accessible to more people in the future. Basically we all want to be paid for our work, in this sense the commercialisation of digital art isn’t anything new.

Maybe I’m missing something but what I've seen so far is underwhelming. I feel like the metaverse should be different from our world with different rules. I want to see digital art installations that couldn't physically exist in real life and sensory experiences that exploit the technology. Not just videos or jpegs on the walls in a blank 3D room or that intensely mediocre rave where you couldn’t even dance. I also think that VR hasn't taken off in the way people hoped so it's not going to be that fun yet. I look forward to seeing where it goes…

I have several live visual performances coming up this year for a range of musicians and a big commercial project (non-spirit-crushing thankfully). In my spare time, I’m learning to program my own tools to finally get away from Adobe and to translate the techniques I use to make art into real-time systems.