IM INTERVIEW | SQUIDSOUP

Anthony Rowe and Chris Bennewith talking about enchantment, space and photography.

YOU COME FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. WHERE AND HOW DID YOU MEET?
A: We don’t actually come from all over the world. We all come from England. We all met in London. Squidsoup, back in the day, in the late 90’s, was based in Shoreditch in London. And all of us, or most of us, worked together then.
Squidsoup went through various sorts of permutations when the dotcom bubble collapsed. Then we moved much more from the commercial sector into art. Shrunk down and sort of gradually changed and metamorphosed into doing corporate research.
I was born in Norway and then I spend the last five years working in Norway. I have just come back to England. Chris lives in New Zealand, you have been there for about five, six years?
C: Yes, five years now!
A: Oli, the guy who does the sound, is based in Sidney, Australia, but he is also English. And Gas and Liam are both in the UK.

YOU WENT THROUGH ALL THE DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES, YOU HAVE TECHNIQUE, LIGHT AND SOUND?
A: Media art is a combination of technique and technology and the application of it.
C: We all got different skills.

IT’S LIKE THE A-TEAM, THE BEST OF THE BEST!
(laughs)
C: I think it’s that what makes it interesting, that we all connect around some point, which is the work that is created. But actually everybody comes from a little bit of a different perspective with different skills. And it’s the kind of blending all of those together which is leading to the result.
A: But it’s quite hard to define each person’s role. I keep getting asked who does what, and basically it is like this: Gas does all the programming, Liam is very good at hardware and making stuff not fall down. (laughs) Chris has got a background in graphic design and I am an interaction designer. But all these roles intertwine. I mean, if I would say Gas is just a programmer, he would probably shoot me.

WHAT WAS THE IMPULSE TO CREATE SUBMERGENCE?
A: I was inspired by the work of Jim Campbell. He does these very low resolution video works. Also, I was intrigued by Jesus Rafael Soto. He does a lot of penetrable spaces. But for me it really was about getting beyond the screen. Get rid of the screen. The screen is like a barrier. My background is in doing CDROMS and websites and stuff. But to make work that is immersive, penetrable is what the mission is. To get rid of the screen, get rid of this barrier between you and what you are seeing.
C: A lot of the works themselves are inspired by aesthetics that you see in other things. The bioluminescence for example, thinking about being able to create trails with your hands that you kind of see in oceans when you sort of disturb creatures. Or the sort of firework-thing… A lot of it is based on trying to recreate those sources or visual effect aesthetics and trying to perfect them as well.
A: And a lot of it again comes from just actually having decided that we are going to get down this route of trying to see if we can create visuals that can occupy physical space. A lot of it becomes experimentation. Like tweaking stuff and bending and seeing what works best.

SO THE INVENTION OF THE LED WAS A RELIEF FOR YOU?
(laughs)
A: We have been doing lots of stuff which are quite hard to do with candles (more laughs). But prior to SUBMERGENCE, we have been doing lots of stuff with augmented reality. Projections, physical kind of interactions. So it was a kind of a limit of technology. Our point was trying to push the limit of blurring and the boundaries between the digital and the physical. When the led technology or the kind of technology that we use came along, it really meant to get into that proper spacial dimension.
C: The light in submergence is very beautiful and actually also very unpredictable since you never know what is going to work and what isn’t. But it’s still just an LED. We are not in love with the technology.

WHAT ARE YOUR LIMITS RIGHT NOW?
A: Money!
C: Yeah, money.
-both laugh –
C: Time?!
A: Physical space. I mean the way in which you can string those things up gives you a certain limitation. Because we always need something that allows you to have a good resolution, but we also want people to move through it.
So we have these vertical strands as a slight limitation. But also the fact that the balls are so obscure. So you can’t have a very tightly clustered piece of work. There is a compromise between being able to have a high enough resolution but still being able to move through the work and still being able to see around, a kind of a closure effect.
C: But I think all of those are becoming quite interesting factors themselves, because the low resolution forces you to think quite differently about what an image is and how you represent stuff in physical space. And also we often say, when we start a work, “wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have all these physical things in space and just have these balls of lights hanging in the space that weren’t tactile”. And yes, in some ways that is true, but actually I think that the tactile aspect of this piece, SUBMERGENCE, is really important. In the fact that you can push the bowls apart, you can grab them and you may swing around. It transforms the atmosphere within the piece, when it’s full of people with all the things swinging around. Compared to when you are experiencing it alone, when it’s very calm and tranquil.
A: It slows you down when you are moving through the work. You can’t run through it.
C: It is also pretty robust. This is designed. It is the third sort of hardware that we have come through. This one is really solid. It’s tough enough, so the kids can grab a bunch of bowls and run and play with it.

WHAT IS THE CRAZIEST THING THAT HAPPENED IN SUBMERGENCE?
C: What about that in Norway when they stared climbing up the ropes?
A: Yes, in Norway, the piece was in a space that had two horizontal beams about two meters from the ground. And these two girls stated climbing up the LEDs to get on to the base. They were completely drunk.
C: There’s a problem with alcohol in the work. – laughs.
A: But we also had some bands filming music videos in it.
C: Dub Mafia and The Forms. Which relates to the other question that you have what does photography add to it. Well, it has been filmed. And it is very photogenic.

HOW MANY LIGHTS DO YOU HAVE?
A: 8.064.
C: And it’s actually three times that since it is RGB!
A: Yes, it’s 8.064 balls of light, inside of which there are two RGB LEDs.

ARE YOU FASCINATED BY TECHNOLOGY?
A: No. It’s a tool. We are interested in it. But I wouldn’t say we are fascinated by it. We are fascinated by the effect, by what we can do with it.
C: We are fascinated by peoples’ fascination with technology, maybe.

SO IS IT ABOUT ENCHANTMENT?
A: Yes, it’s a lot about enchantment and immersion, just like going woooaaahhh!

WHAT DOES SPACE, PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL, MEAN TO YOU?
A: I think it’s absolutely integral to it. We are spacial animals and this gets me back to think about the screen. The problem with the screen is that it’s not a spacial thing. It’s flat and two dimensional. And we are in three dimensions. So anything that can have a spacial meaning in any kind of intuitive relationship with you, is spacial. I mean, a screen is spacial because it is in the space, but the image within the screen is kind of separated. So we take that image out of the screen and place the viewer within it. Then you have to think quite carefully about space.
So I would say that what this work is doing, is taking a virtual space and placing it in physical space. And creating, as a result of that, a hybrid of the two.
C: One of the other things, is that we are trying to do that without anything in between. We used to do stuff with lots of 3D glasses and that kind of thing. But here we really try to have no encumbrance between you and the work at all. You just step inside and experience it, you don’t need any sort of additional interface of any type.

THERE IS NO FORCED PERSPECTIVE, IT’S OPEN FROM EVERYWHERE.
C: Yes, it’s kind of the opposite to virtual reality. Where you put something on and you transport yourself into that kind of digital space. We sort of bring that digital space out into a physical environment around you.

WALKING THROUGH SUBMERGENCE, ONE CAN EXPERIENCE FOUR DIFFERENT MOODS. WHY EXACTLY THOSE FOUR?
A: The first one is called “lanterns” and it’s a very calm thing where you have this spheres, lights or lanterns that are slowly wafting through the space. If you go up to them, they pop. The idea behind that was to create a very calm and serene environment.
The second part is called “divided space”. In that, the space is divided by a wall of light. There’s a hollow cube with a single plane that is moving in it. The space is divided into two negative spaces. When you walk into it, that dissolves and the whole space acts like a bioluminescent fluid. And as you walk through it, you leave this trail of light behind you, as you disturb the air. So that’s sort of a little bit more active than the first part, but still very calm and contemplative.
The third part is called “swarm”. We have coded a swarm of lights that respond to each other and are moving around the space but mind their own business until you walk into it. And then, when someone walks into the space they swarm around the head and are attracted to it. And if you get more than one person they start to move from person to person.
The final part is called “ecstatic”, it is kind of sticking your head into a firework explosion. It expands rapidly with waves of light coming towards you. And it ends with 5-10 seconds of flashing lights. Every light flashes in different colours at the same time. That was the strongest visual experience we could create. The most extreme.
So the narrative over the period of 20 minutes is gradually an increase of tension till the climatic finale and then it stops and starts again from the beginning. An orgasm.

AN ORGASM?
C: Yes! There’s a foreplay, the lovemaking, the orgasm… And then it stops! And goes to sleep.

HOW IMPORTANT IS PHOTOGRAPHY IN RELATION TO YOUR WORK? IS IT ABLE TO ADD SOMETHING TO YOUR WORK?
A: The work is itself a response to a lot of the screen-based stuff out there and this barrier that is created. Photography obviously is a classic example of a two dimensional medium. So the piece is inspired by trying to get beyond that. But on the other hand, what has happened, is that it is visually very photogenic. As a result it is a very appealing thing to photograph. And that feedback loop is quite interesting.
C: And it’s a marketing tool in and out of itself. When we exhibited in Bristol, people go, they start to stick it up on Instagram, on Twitter, whatever. And people just going “Wow, what is that thing?” and then they come, they take more pictures. So we have this viral spread of imagery that pulls more and more people coming in to see it. So it is quite useful. It’s a promotion.
A: But I have to say, that there are also parts of the piece, of the experience, that a photograph cannot catch. So people, having seen the pictures, which are very photogenic and work very well in their own right. When they come to see the actual piece themselves, it’s a completely different experience. And people are unexpectedly shocked by it. It’s like: „Wow! That is not what I envisioned.”

DO YOU EVER SEE PICTURES OF YOUR PIECE IN SOCIAL MEDIA THAT SURPRISE YOU? THAT YOU DID NOT EXPECT TO SEE?
A: Yes, all the time! In Bristol actually somebody took a pair of glasses and changed the point of light into heart shapes. And then took a lot of pictures with hearts flying all over the place. So in a sense it’s a great blank photographic canvas, cause it’s relatively unrepresentative. But it’s beautiful. So whatever you take, it’s going to look good. People come out with all kinds of stuff.

Anthony Rowe and Chris Bennewith, thank you very much!

Photo © Miguel Martinez