11 questions with Invisible Flock

Image: Aurora, an elemental installation made for the iconic Toxteth Reservoir in Liverpool, by Invisible Flock in collaboration with Miebi Sikoki & Rudi Nurhandi (Digital Nativ, Indonesia), Babitha George & Romit Raj (Quicksand, India), Abshar Platisza (Indonesia), Azusa Ono (Japan/UK), Bagus Pandega (Indonesia), Etza Meisyara (Indonesia), James Hamilton (UK) and Simon Fletcher (UK).

For my latest interview, I’m thrilled to have been able to talk to Invisible Flock, the award-winning interactive arts studio based at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The group operates at the intersection of art and technology and are artist led. Working from a sustainable laboratory space, they provide a fantastic residency programme and invest their time in some of the most mesmerising sensory installations and environments to “renegotiate our emotional relationship to the natural world”. Take a look at Invisible Flock’s wonderful response as part of their 11 answers kindly sent my way by Invisible Flock's Technical Director Ben Eaton.

1. How did Invisible Flock originate?

   We began 12 + years ago making installation heavy interactive experiences for audiences. We’d come out of an installation theatre and live art world and were primarily focussed on technology and interaction and bringing audiences into the work in new and experiential ways. In that time the team has expanded, Ben and Victoria were joined by Catherine and later Klavs and our expanded universe of friends and collaborators slowly coalesced. Although I think you could still find grains of what we are now as a studio, even in our very first scrappy pieces, in a way I think the studio as it now exits became the most recognisable when we began to work internationally as I think the scope and tone of the work shifted then to what we are now.

2. What does it mean to you to be artist led?

   For us it remains about the proximity to the work, having a belief that the mechanics by which a piece of work is brought about and the stuff that gets decided around the office table is as important to the practice as the work that happens in the workshop or in R&D. Simply it means that our focus is always on the practice and the studio’s choices are always focussed on how to best protect, nurture and grow it.

3. Why are you interested in interactive and participatory art?

   We have always been interested in dissolving the barriers that often sit surrounding culture, those of physical space, time, lines between audience and creator, formalised or informalised participation. We live in a time where technology allows us to create and imagine new forms of interaction and participation all the time, and it's not only an exciting time for artists in that respect but it is also beholden to them to be part of this conversation. It is even more crucial to be re-imagining what it means to be an audience, or a participant in this distributed technological age before the slow inevitable creep of monetisation and commercialisation completely overtakes what could be incredible and beautiful means of communication.

4. How does Invisible Flock relate to nature?

   Deeply. All of our practice is rooted within it. It has been our explicit sole focus as a studio for the past 5 years. We moved our studio out of the city last year and most of our collaborators and projects involve working directly with ecosystems that are at risk or people living on the edge of environmental collapse. Both our artistic output as a studio and also our research and thinking is around developing new and critically in depth techniques to consider our place within nature.

5. What’s Invisible Flock's one message to the world?

   We’ve never been very good at slogans which i think is part of why we make art.

6. What's Invisible Flock's approach to new technologies?

   Critical and suspicious whilst remaining always open to its possibilities. We think of technology as a tool and get excited about what it allows us to do, but this does not mean that the tech itself has to be brand new, rather it can be new to us, or be suddenly accessible to us due to some newly acquired knowledge. But technology is a violent and destructive force the downstream effects of which are often far removed from us and our audiences. We try and exist beyond consumer level tech and gadgets and instead have a more critical approach to the full vocabulary of a technology, which involves considering its lifespan, how fully it can articulate an idea, how much it allows us to use it expressively as artists rather than as physical extensions of the object’s original developer’s vision.

7. How has Invisible Flock changed over the last decade?

   We are a tight and small team of people so we have changed as much as anyone does in a decade, ie quite a lot and not at all at the same time. We have been incredibly fortunate to work with some brilliant colleagues around the world and to undertake some incredible projects and work and this has allowed us to arrive at a place where we are able to look at our work and the wider industry with an amount of calm and reflectiveness. We strive to be in control of our work, take the time to think things through deeply and run our organisation with kindness openness and integrity.

8. What are some of your current projects?

   We are taking part in some long form projects at the moment, partly driven by the pandemic but also by choice, we have been collating year long audio recordings in the arctic circle with some remote field recorders we invented. We are re-developing a piece of work that was shown in Indonesia two years ago that creates a series of tangible and kinetic sculptures all drawn from a series of endangered landscapes. We also have a large project that came out of months of recordings of the jungle in Sumatra just before the pandemic hit that brings audiences into the rhythms of the life of Siamang gibbons in the jungle.

9. What are Invisible Flock's ambitions for the next decade?

   We are making an interesting new move into research at the moment and are working hard so that our work and practice has real world impact so that will be an exciting new direction. Other than that I hope like the last decade to have changed a lot and not at all and to still be making work that is relevant and useful and a net positive for the environment, audiences and my immediate community. 

10. What's the one object Invisible Flock would bring to a desert island?

    A field recorder. Seeing as no matter where I am every time I try and record nature some kind of human noise always shows up eventually I would only need to start recording to be sure to be rescued.  But if I wasn’t rescued then I would want to capture that silence before it disappears.

11. What's your one piece of advice to aspiring artists?

    There’s no one way to do it, or one definition of practice.

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Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for more 11 questions (and answers) from artists, makers and creatives coming your way soon. Never miss an issue by subscribing to my mailing list, and in the meantime feel free to take a look at my blog and some of my work as an artist.

11 questions with Sophie Dumaresq

Hello 2021. I’m very excited to be able to kick off the new year with an interview with the incredibly talented Sophie Dumaresq, who talked to me about her mesmerising work as a visual artist. Based in Australia, Sophie’s vibrant art spans from new media robotics and photo media to large and small scale sculptural installations. ‘Her work explores symbiotic cycles of consumption, destruction and creation demonstrating how as a species we relate, show empathy and evolve with and within our surrounding environment’. Read her inspiring 11 answers below!

1. Why hair?

   I started to experience hair loss due to endometriosis and changes within my environment. I started to collect the hair not only from my self but also from other womb carrying humans. I also started doing research into possible relationships between exposure to toxins within the environment, the female sex reproductive system and the physical make up of hair itself as well as its symbolism. I found it fascinating that the nitrogen bonds in hair make it a wonderful fertiliser for soil while also being use historically as symbol of fertility and womanhood. Its symbolism and practical use in my work has further evolved but in my earlier works it very much was an exploration of the materiality of what it is to feel alien and toxic.

2. What's your relationship with nature?

   Complex yet filled with love, but I do get frustrated when people place nature on a pedestal as being somehow separate from the human animal when we are part of it, warts and all. My work often stems from this frustration that things somehow need to be perfect to be worthy of our love. As an artist, the materiality of our world I find is my outlet for being able to love while acknowledging the good and the bad that come with all things.

3. What is The Hairy Panic?

   So the Hairy Panic itself is a nickname for Pancium effuse which is a native species of “weed” here in Australia. It is toxic for livestock. In 2016, it invaded and brought the town of Wangarratta to a standstill.

   My Hairy Panic tumbleweeds, named after the “weed” are large hand made pink tumbleweeds make out of fencing wire and chemically processed and dyed human hair that I then installed and photographed out on a cattle farm. I think what first attracted me to the project as a white, non indigenous Australian was when I read that the original Hairy Panic was described as being a “native weed.” I couldn't stop thinking about how can something be native but also a weed? It got me thinking about who decides when something is “toxic” or a “weed” and why.

   The specific shade of pink of the tumbleweeds came from the colour of the pesticide Round up containing Monsanto Glyphosate that is still used here in Australia.

4. What's your favourite medium to work with?

   Metal, there is something quite primal with an air of Frankenstein about it for me in the way it responds to heat and makes you aware of the particles in the air around you while you are working with it. I am at my happiest when soldering or sitting in a welding bay.

5. What's your favourite part of the creative process?

   The actual physical act of making the sculptural works. While making the Hairy Panic, I spent weeks just sitting silently welding together the fencing metal or brushing and braiding together the hair. A couple of friends joked about me going insane but I think it was the most sane that I’ve ever felt during a project. That’s also I guess what someone who had actually gone insane would feel, so who knows.

6. What are you currently working on?

   I’m currently collecting resources for my next big project while doing a commissioned collaborative work. I did just finish a recent project done on work by Australian environmental conservationists with endangered shore birds.

   It was based on the use of human hair in socks as a more humane pest control measure against foxes. The scent of the human from the hair acts as a deterrent to the foxes to keep them away from the nests. For the project I made a series of images around the symbolism of the fox, my own white colonial heritage and the socks that I then created from human nursery fleece and human hair.

7. What's the one piece of art you'd love to make, but haven't yet?

   The project I am collecting hair and metal to work on for next year. It is another sculptural land art installation similar in scale and aesthetic to my previous work “The Hairy Panic” but closer to my baby pink human hair wearing robotic cow skull “She” in themes of materiality.

8. If you could pick one person to collaborate with, dead, alive, or fictional who would it be?

   David Lynch, I have the upmost respect for his creative process in terms of his belief in the power of the day dream and then how we go about materialising those images into the world. There is also just something about his ability to make the romantic ugly and in turn the ugly romantic.

9. What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?

   I guess as an artist or creative, if you enjoy the meme, make sure you're putting in the time to actually read and understand the theory behind it. Which to me pretty much comes down to putting in the time to learn about the work of those who came before you and the heritage of your shared concepts and ideas. It doesn’t have to mean becoming an academic but for me it helped me feel less lonely within my art practice which I found helped dealing with things like imposter syndrome and that crippling sometimes paralysing doubt that most creatives experience at least once during the making process.

10. What's the one object you'd bring to a desert island?

    It is a little boring but I think Heritage seeds for the win. One of my favourite authors is Octavia E Butler and if her Parable novels have taught me anything, it is that being able to grow your own food is essential. I can always break off a branch or find a rock to sharpen to use as a weapon and or tool once I am there.

11. What's your one message to the world?

    Be active and curious about the world and don’t just listen to those who make you feel comfortable about your position within it.

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Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for more 11 questions with artists, makers and creatives coming your way soon. Never miss an issue by subscribing to my mailing list, and in the meantime feel free to take a look at my blog and some of my work as an artist.