Art collective Squidsoup talk to us about working with Four Tet, taking their installations on the road, sustainability, and Beyond Submergence.
For the last few months Cheltenham-based art collective Squidsoup have occupied Bristol’s Propyard with their latest exhibition Beyond Submergence. The project combines some of the groups best works such as Submergence, Wave, Sola, and more, and offers an experience unlike any other.
Founded by Anthony Rowe in 1997, the group have developed bespoke technologies for their projects with the aim of creating unique sensory experiences. Their popular live show with electronic musician Four Tet has been showcased in cities such as London, Los Angeles, New York, and Sydney, to name a few.
Blurring the lines between worlds and creating shared experiences are strong themes throughout Squidsoup’s work. With research at it’s core, the group continuously experiment, flirting with different ideas and contexts in which they can apply their art.
Whether it’s working with electronic musicians such as Four Tet and Christian Löffler, hosting sound meditation sessions, or creating multi-sensory dining experiences, Squidsoup endeavour to dissolve the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds to inspire, heal, and immerse.
Liam Birtles and Hannah Brady spoke to us about their history, taking their installations on the road, and the wider implications of Beyond Submergence.
For the readers that may not know, could you give us a brief overview of who Squidsoup are, and what your mission is?
Hannah: We’re a collective of artists, producers, creative technologists, and programmers based in Cheltenham. There are seven of us currently, and we create large-scale transformative experiences that are exhibited and presented across the world. We collaborate with musicians such as Four Tet and create works for galleries such as the Beyond Submergence exhibition, which is currently on at the Propyard in Bristol.
We do quite a lot of works for light trails across the world. Recently, we’ve been shown in Vivid in Sydney on one of their large luminaire trails.
Liam: We also work with charities and organisations, and we try to work at different levels. Some work we do is more commercial with larger names and audiences. Some are on a smaller scale. And some are community led projects that may have a particular social agenda attached.
Hannah: We also work on projects that are purely about the experimentation and testing of new technology. We tend to create our own bespoke creative technologies which being a non-technical person myself, I call them our paints.
Essentially, we create a set of paints or a medium that we can then create all sorts of different artworks. Those sets of bespoke technologies might be used in many different ways. They might be very large-scale static installations, or they might be a smaller scale and movable.
We’ve done them on bikes, suspended them over buildings, off of bridges. We’ve even filled Ally Pally with our lights when working with Four Tet.
Whilst we are on the topic of the Four Tet live show. Can you explain a bit about how that piece was created and performed?
Liam: Over the last 15 years we’ve created a piece of software which is a volumetric rendering engine. It’s a real-time particle system that can be controlled and triggered in real time.
That effectively renders into this large LED grid. These particle events look like moving waves and explosions, and this exists within a three-dimensional space. It’s essentially our own bespoke 3-dimensional computer graphics engine.
The performances are done live and respond in real time to whatever Four Tet’s doing. The normal process is that we will get some sort of set list. Then we construct a set of behaviours or events that we would have pre-planned to respond to what’s going on.
Those tools include things like being able to draw in real time over the space, to put explosions around, and to send various events throughout the space. On the night, a couple of people will sit there on separate laptops firing off these events as the music goes along.
How did your connection with Four Tet come about?
Liam: It’s a personal connection through sometime Squidsoup member and collaborator Ollie Bown. It was all pretty synchronous. We were looking for opportunities to do more performance-based stuff with the light grid because originally it was constructed as an installation.
We had already developed the core software and the rendering engine for the artwork Submergence and then the connection came through Ollie. Kieran had a particular interest in changing the dynamics, as did we between performer and audience. What underpins that relationship is the fact that the audience and Kieran are in the space together.
More than just putting on a big show, what underlies most of the content is the attempt at redefining the relationship between the sound, the act of music making, and the audience.
You have taken many installations on the road such as Sola, Singularity, and Wave. Can you share some of your experiences touring with some of these installations?
Liam: The first time we put wave up was in response to the Skripal Poisonings in Salisbury. It was a work about cleansing and the spiritual nature of water. We put it outside the Salisbury Cathedral. I think it was the first night we’d hung all these relatively delicate balls up, and the winds hit 80 miles an hour. We came out and things were just smashed and all over the floor. We had to modify the design after that one.
We did Burning man too! I would describe that Burning Man as camping in a gravel pit. We had to put together an object 6 metres by 6 meters high, 6 metres wide and 25 metres long, and we had to put this up in the desert at 40 degrees heat in the days. We would work from 3:00am till 11:00am. Then you would stop for the middle of the day and then go back out and work again at night. It’s that sort of thing. There’s a lot of chaos that goes on around the artworks.
Another thing to remember is that we build most of these technologies, as Hannah said. The wave devices, all the hardware and software, all of that is ours, so when we get on site and stuff doesn’t work, there’s no manufacturer we can call. I mean, it’s good fun, don’t get me wrong. But it’s very stressful at points.
You have taken some installations to festivals as well such as Endless which was at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. Can you talk about some of the research you have conducted regarding the sustainability of these rural, festival-based installations?
Hannah: About a year ago, we were doing some strategic thinking and one of our top priorities was around our environmental impact and the sustainability of our company.
One of the things that drives us insane is that we will often go to these festivals, and they will provide these huge, chunky generators (that aren’t great) to power our very low powered LED light work experiences.
So, for one, we were very keen to think about how we could create our own sources of power for our artworks, but additionally, it allows us to take our work anywhere in the world. It opens the whole world up for us to use as a canvas. So that is equally as exciting for us.
Firstly, we got a little bit of money from Stockton International Riverside to play with solar and electric car batteries. Here in Cheltenham there’s an electric car company called Cleveley. They help us understand the electric car battery and how we can use that to store power. We then worked with a solar provider, and we spent a lot of time measuring the power intakes and losses of our artworks to better understand how we can work with these off-grid energy sources to essentially create our own system.
It’s quite complicated to buy off the shelf products so we decided to do it ourselves. Now we have this document which tells us how much power the different types of technologies we’ve created use. Then we can calculate what we need in terms of solar panels, car batteries, and runtime.
We tested that out in Glastonbury. The idea around Endless was that this Is an experiment. There was a possibility that it might not actually come on. Luckily enough, we plugged it in, and it worked. Not only did it work, but it also ran 24/7 from the moment we it opened on the Wednesday through to the end of the festival.
Liam: Off of the back of that, I think the more complex issue to deal with is how you change the way you think about what you make. You can’t get away from consumption, it’s a part of life. But what you can do is think about that consumption as part of what you do. Most of the time we’re in a position where we are just creating and generating stuff, but it needs to become part of our process to really think about sustainability at a deep level.
It’s like typography. You have to think about typography as you’re putting the layout together. If you think about sustainability in the same way you think about typography, it becomes part of your aesthetic set of tools at the start. That’s the important thing.
Has your perspective on certain pieces changed after seeing it presented in different locations?
Hannah: I think its interesting bringing our works together in a large-scale exhibition space. It creates many more challenges for us as a collective than other projects. We often work in a different way than when we work with light festivals, for example, who have already created the audience journey or a one-off installation where audiences come and experience it in their own way.
Because our artworks use light and sound, it very much lends itself to a journey through the space because they will have their own standalone experience.
It’s quite a challenge when we think about how audiences’ experience our work in a gallery exhibition format. Everyone wants something slightly different, and trying to find the journey that works has been an interesting challenge for us.
It feels like a live experience that will evolve, and its changed the way we think about how audiences come into this dark space and be offered a choreographed journey through our work. How it builds, how the sounds work together, and where they sit in that space have all been new things for us to consider and experiment with.
Liam: We have been looking at the journey time, and one of the things that’s going on is that the works do run sequentially, which is part of the aesthetic choice. But what you realise is that you can bounce between the work.
You can turn one off and have the other run for very short periods. It’s the dialogue between them that becomes something. As Hannah said, it becomes a live experiment.
Hannah: I think that having the work indoors in a gallery setup is a very different offer to it being outdoors in different type of environment. I think the actual content is different. It’s somehow a more intimate and focused experience.
When it’s outdoors, it’s often more of a spectacle or part of another journey. There are other experiences that you are being taken on rather than being drawn into a close relationship with the artwork.
The work in a gallery situation for us is how the work should be experienced. To have the time to really let yourself be taken in and transformed by the artwork, rather than it being this quick spectacle. You need to spend time with it. I think that’s what the exhibition offers far greater than any other environment that we’ve exhibited the work in prior.
I watched the video for your installations at Sailsbury Cathedral and in it, Anthony Rowe spoke about how conceptually, the work was aimed at fusing the digital and the physical worlds together. Based on the research you have conducted so far, what do you think are the wider connotations of bringing these digital and physical worlds together?
Liam: I would say at this moment – and please bear in mind that what I currently think may change – I don’t think there is a difference. I don’t actually believe in extended or virtual reality. I think there is just reality, and I believe these are consistent experiences. It’s kind of like asking what a painting adds to a space. It’s a representation. It’s imagery. This is the same thing but with a digital layer.
I don’t think you can replace one world with another, and in order to understand these virtual spaces you need a reference point which is the real world. What you perceive, what you see, and what you think about is a model that is constantly building in your head. What you think you see and what you actually see are quite different.
Another part of it is humanity is playing with tool sets. You just know it makes the world interesting. I’m an artist. Why wouldn’t I make stuff? I make stuff because I think it’s fun and interesting. I don’t see how using technology in the arts is any different from using, as Hannah said, paint or anything else. It’s a medium of expression.
Do you have any thoughts on that Hannah?
Hannah: I think similar to Liam in the sense that, for me, what our works encourage is a collective shared experience within a different type of space. A space that allows you to slow down and forget. It’s something that is slightly different for everyone. There’s never any one type of area, and everybody relates to the work in different ways.
We know that the work is calming and that it can be hypnotic. It can put you in a space where you know you have time to think and let your mind to wonder, but you’re also doing this in a collective and shared space. You’re with others, and you can experience it together. You can stand within, or on the outside. You have choice.
For me, the environments we create bring people together in a calming, open, and fairly abstract environment to have conversations and seek new perspectives.
Liam: I think much of it is what people bring to the experience. The important thing here is that you can see other people’s eyes. In any screen based medium, the eyes are mediated, as is the human contact. I think we realised a long time ago that to have the human element unmediated by the machine makes a massive difference.
It changes things because it becomes a truly shared experience, whereas no matter what you do in VR, or anything screen based, you are always mediating between people in the space, and that is, in my mind, a very different kind of experience.
Hannah: Yeah, I think it really does expand it. I think that the exhibition space provides an opportunity to be removed from the chaos of outdoors and into a more intimate and calm space. Of course, the digital layer of it creates a spectacle as well as moments of chaos and intensity, but then it brings you down into a state of stillness, and I think that’s the true intention of our work.
There are certain environments where it’s not experienced in that way, and it’s much more just about the spectacle. But if you think about the Four Tet gig, although it’s huge, that experience is intimate for the audience.
Liam: You’re right there in the space with Four Tet.
Hannah: Exactly! It feels like you’re bringing everything into this space, which I think is so unique about that experience. It’s huge, but it’s intimate at the same time. It’s quite a difficult thing to get your head around.
Liam: We’re currently doing an NHS research project looking at healthcare and well-being effects, and I thought about the neurodivergent in these sorts of immersive spaces. It’s like you’re moving without moving in some ways.
There seems to be a sensory narrative going on with this interplay of light as you look at people quite often in the rig. You’re looking at what other people are doing, you’re in there with the people, and they are with you in that space. You see the interplay of light across their face which means you’re constantly re-evaluating your opinion of them. You are looking deeply at other people because the light is moving in a way which causes the environment to change.
It’s like when cameras do multiple exposures, and you get levels of detail. I think it’s the same kind of idea, but you’re getting multiple exposures of people the space itself. I think the reason it applies to the NHS stuff is because it provides a narrative to the space. There’s always a kind of rich sensorial narrative coming at you.
Beyond Submergence is running until September 29th at Propyard. Purchase tickets here.
