Projects & Collaborations
by Bruce Gilchrist
I am an artist trained in fine art with formative professional experience in performance and experimental theatre practice. My current projects are informed by research around imaginative narrative media understood as combinations of machine learning models and performance as hybrid, intermedia artworks. A conception of cultural AI as a contemporary form of remix technique emerged through practice-based research, artist residency and international fellowship
Never before has the body and its behaviour been such an explicit interface.
I co-founded the collaborative artist group London Fieldworks in 2000, producing artwork in the form of installation (for the gallery and landscape), video, animation, and radio, with commissions from Future City; Art, Space Nature; Rei Kawakubo (DSMNY); Abandon Normal Devices (AND); PEER Gallery, London amongst others. London Fieldworks has received various accolades including—Art Foundation Award (Art in the Elements); London Short Film Festival (Best Experimental Short); Ars Electronica (Honorary Mention Hybrid Art category); Art And Artificial Life International Awards (Special Mention ) issued by VIDA 10.0 Madrid.
In 2018 I collaboratively researched a new project combining computational cinema, robotics and performance that re-imagined a blend of factory and warehouse, transforming arrangements of labour, capital, media and information into a new space of cultural production (supported by Arts Council England). This led to an AHRC-funded practice-based PhD project (2018–2022) Poetics of Artificial Intelligence in Art Practice: (Mis)apprehended Bodies Remixed as Language.
An AHRC Research Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University (2002–2005) and a Science Museum SMAP5 commission (2005) generated materials for the project Null Object: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing (2012). This project explored the idea of ‘nothing’ as a productive category by connecting neurophysiology, psychophysics and manufacturing technology to produce sculpture. This work has recently been exhibited at KU Leuven as part of To The Edge of Time (2022).
Before co-founding LFW my main activities were as a solo and collaborative artist within the digital live art arena. I was awarded first prize by the ICA-Toshiba Art & Innovation Commission with software programmer Jonny Bradley for the durational, digital live art performance Divided By Resistance (1995), curated by Lois Keiden as part of Totally Wired at the ICA, London (1996). This commission proved to be seminal to a body of work exploring the aesthetics of the database—the poetic retrieval of records in the manner of a search engine—alongside physiological interfaces in performance and installation practice.
An earlier period of activity included ensemble performance projects with several groups performing worldwide, including Station House Opera, Blast Theory, and People Show, amongst others.
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