Gary Stewart

Royal Academy
London, UK
Dec 2018

Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison

Performance on SoundCloud 48 min

Performance in the Collections Gallery showcase at Burlington Gardens as part of their 250th year celebrations. The performance, entitled "Sonic Redux," featured vocalist Gretchen Cummings and incorporated gallery recordings and responsive music using plant sensors to create a collective sonic space, a layered tapestry of past and imagined futures.

Image: Aniruddha Das

Biblioteca Parque
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
November 2018

Installation Gary Stewart

FLUP A Festa Literaria Das Periferias. The International Literary Festival of the Peripheries is an international literary festival whose main characteristic is to happen in territories traditionally excluded from literary programs.

In the middle of the 1970’s military dictatorship, Zuzu Angel, a fashion designer, becomes more and more famous in Brazil and abroad. Meanwhile, her son Stuart joins the armed struggle against the dictatorship. She, a businesswoman and he fighting for the socialist revolution.

Stuart is arrested, tortured and murdered by the agents of the Aeronautical Information Center, being given as political disappeared. Zuzu begins a battle to locate the body of the son and to bury it, denouncing the tortures and death, becoming an increasingly uncomfortable figure for the dictatorship.

The installation was made with the contribution of 12 fashion designers who created a special collection and show that responded to the work of Zuzu Angel which she created in protest following the detention, torture and murder of her son.

Th Installation was made possible by the artist residency at Casa Rio workspace for artists, creatives and cultural professionals set by Peoples Palace Projects.

Tate Modern
October 2018

Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison

Contemporary African Art Fair
Somerset House, London, UK
October 2018

Video editor Gary Stewart

Video on YouTube 6 min

Video editor for Required Reading installation. SWP partnered with UK’s non-profit 198 CAL for 1:54’s Special Projects programme with 'Required Reading', a showcasing of work by two Jamaican artists, Leasho Johnson and Monique Gilpin. Both artists engage with issues of identity, particularly as they relate to the Black body - its' objectification, its wounds, its power and the unrelenting tensions of navigating identity in a post plantation society and economy. The digital work produced draws on the work of Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his investigation into the processes of identity location in 'being' and 'becoming', and how these dynamics work in contemporary Jamaica’s visual culture.

Image. Leasho Johnson, How to kill a soundboy

BBC Radio 4
June 2018

Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison and Aniruddha Das

Dubmorphology / Aniruddha Das on SoundCloud 4 min
Full programme on BBC Radio 4 32 min

Echoes have forever been a source of both fear and wonder. Composer Sarah Angliss reveals why we find them so compelling and how we've tried to capture their thrill down the ages. Natural echoes have often been mimicked in music, creating a sense of other worldliness, and the echo effect has always been central to the world of dub reggae, as demonstrated by a performance by Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison of Dubmorphology with Aniruddha Das from Asian Dub Foundation who push the echo to the edge of chaos.

True/False film festival
Columbia, US
March 2018

Interactive Installation Gary Stewart

As part of the True/False film festival, 1 - 4 March Columbia, Missouri, I am remaking and reconfiguring the Materialities Montage Mixer interactive installation which was first made for The Ghosts of Songs - A Retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective in 2007. This participatory experience explores the ways in which the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998) constructed their groundbreaking experimental non-linear feature films and tape-slide installations. Viewers will be invited to re-work and re-appropriate archival and found material in a participative process which characterised the Collective’s interest in 1980s British politics and art.

It will be shown in the TRANSMEDIA section of the festival which aims to delve more deeply into the frontiers of interactive transmedia, showcasing artists and storytellers who’ve jumped the fences of traditional platforms.

Transmedia

True/False film festival
Columbia, US
March 2018

Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison

Q&A on YouTube 46 mins

Dubmorphology will be creating a live soundtrack to an imagined film as part of the festival’s Neither/Nor program. This collaboration with writer and programmer Ashley Clark celebrates the work of Black Audio Film Collective as part of a programme that explores the shifting boundaries of documentary filmmaking. Founded by film director John Akomfrah and producers Lina Gopaul and David Lawson, Smoking Dogs Films emerged from Black Audio Film Collective and continues to expand upon the narrative possibilities of creative documentary, feature films, music videos and art based films.

During the festival, Clark is presenting four films from the collective’s catalogue: Handsworth Songs, Testament, Twilight City and Who Needs a Heart. The screenings will be followed by discussions with Black Audio Film Collective members Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison and Dubmorphology collaborator Gary Stewart.

Neither/Nor

Twilight City (1989) Director Reece Auguiste

Arts Catalyst
London, UK
January 2018

Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison, Derek Richards and Mykaell Riley

Discussion on SoundCloud 1 hr 36 min

A discussion and sonic celebration of migration and the musical contribution of cultural diasporas to British culture, as part of the 'Dreamed Native Ancestry [DNA] programme. With sound artists Dubmorphology (Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison), multimedia artist and musician Derek Richards (aka HyperJAM aka rizomorph), and music producer Mykaell Riley.

Derek Richards is an artist, musician, composer and producer. As an artist, he has exhibited installation work around the world. He has worked as a musician, has scored for film and TV and composed music for and directed theatre. In the 90s, he co-founded Artec, the UK’s first centre for learning digital media production skills. He ran his own production company HyperJAM. Derek is a member of the audio-visual improv trio, YMV, featuring legendary jazz musicians Cleveland Watkiss and Orphy Robinson.

Mykaell Riley’s career started as a founder member of Steel Pulse. As a professional writer / producer, his work has encompassed TV, Film and Theatre, resulting in over eleven UK top twenty positions, and three UK number ones before moving into Academia. As Head of Music Production at the University of Westminster, he’s collaborated on projects for; the Mayor of London, Arts council England, The British Library, The British Museum, The Maritime Museum and the V&A, whilst also working as external examiner for Open University. Mykaell’s also director of The Black Music Research Unit, which in 2016, received the first major AHRC award entitled ‘Bass Culture’ to research the impact of reggae in Britain. Mykaell’s most recent output was the Ticketmaster State of Play Grime report.

Steel Pulse 1978. Courtesy Island Records

Sound System Outernational #4
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
January 2018

Performance on SoundCloud 20 min

Reflections on Dub and the Aesthetics of Noise
Dubmorphology and Dr. Das

For the conference Dubmorphology artists Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison with occasional collaborator musician Aniruddha Das will be expanding on how they apply dub philosophy as a way to test out, explore, probe and investigate speculative sonic territories of social transformation.

Dub Media Archaeologies – the Ghosts of Dub
Eddie George

Eddie George will be speaking about his ongoing research around dub, architecture, archaeology, the photographer Eugene Atget, critical theorist Walter Benjamin, and about what haunts dub and also who and what dub haunts.

Sound System Culture & UK Dance Music
Felix Parry, Goldsmiths

This paper presents a socio-ethnomusicological investigation into Jamaican sound systemculture, its presence in England, and the subsequent influence it has had on music in the UK.

Spiquency
Thali Lotus, CAYA Sound

A look at the relationship between Spirit, Frequency and Vibration and how this has an effect on audience connectivity with the Sound Artist, with particular reference to Roots & Culture & Dub compositions. 2018 Thali Lotus-CAYA sound system.

Image: Dave Lewis

Arts Catalyst
London, UK
Nov 2017 - Jan 2018

Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison and Zaynab Bunsie

An installation and programme critically addressing and re-thinking contemporary issues around race, migration, biopolitics and culture, through an Afrofuturist science fiction narrative and deep history perspective.

Dreamed Native Ancestry (DNA) inhabits an imagined scenario, drawing on Afrofuturist philosophies, to explore and celebrate the stories, experiences and knowledge of migrants and their families and diaspora peoples through a lens of technoculture and science fiction. The name of the installation playfully challenges shifting ideas around how we define identity – from biographical narrative and social context, to the authoritative, seemingly concrete, answers given by modern biometrics, such as ancestry DNA testing - to probe into complex questions of who we are and where we come from.

Concept and narrative by Gaylene Gould. Curated by Arts Catalyst’s Artistic Director, Nicola Triscott, Dreamed Native Ancestry (DNA)is the first part of Arts Catalyst’s long-term curatorial research programme Radical Ancestry, which explores deep histories of human migration and contemporary biopolitics of race.

Arts Catalyst

Trevor Mathison, Zaynab Bunsie, Gary Stewart

Image: Tom Hall

St. Mary's Church
London, UK
December 2017

Performance on SoundCloud 7 min

A contemporary revisiting of the traditional nativity story for the artist event 'If On A Winter's Night' with Jonathan Rathbone, St Mary’s Director of Music and Choir.

A sonic journey of imagination and discovery taping into the wonder and strangeness of the Christmas season through the nativity story that speaks to universal hopes and fears that continue to inspire, comfort and confound people the world over.

A unique, one-time event If On A Winter's Night featured 9 Artists using puppetry, stand-up comedy, performance art, sound installation and more. Each of them had been invited to create work in response to 9 Carols.

Dubmorphology created and played a live soundscape accompanied by a professional choir singing traditional Christmas carols.

BFI British Film Institute
London, UK
October 2017

Sound tracks on SoundCloud
The Conversation T-1 7 min
The Conversation T-2 2 min
The Conversation T-3 3 min
The Conversation T-4 2 min

Installation and live performance by Dubmorphology in relation to the screening of Copolla's film "The Conversation" for the launch of the season of films Who Can You Trust?

USA 1974. Dir Francis Ford Coppola. With Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield. 113min. Digital. 12A
Gene Hackman excels as Harry Caul, a legendary surveillance expert who becomes obsessed with a fragment of conversation he’s commissioned to secretly record. Copolla’s taut, sparse thriller is a reflection of the paranoid, post-Vietnam American psyche, channels the fears of an intensifying Cold War and is a commentary on the voyeuristic nature of cinema.

Inspired by the relationship of surveillance sound to cinema, the BFI Southbank was wired by Dubmorphology for a sound-based evening, blurring the line between viewer and protagonist.

Image: Aniruddha Das

St Mary’s Church
December 2016

Advent(us) Day 16: Stuart Moore Photography's images of Sri Lanka and Walthamstow showed that beauty can be found far away or close to home. Accompanied by Christmas music from the East London Brass Band.

Image: Stuart Moore

Digital Makers: Tate Britain
London, UK
October 2016

Workshop artist Gary Stewart

Tate Website

Workshop remixing sound and images to make your own digital artwork inspired by artist Sophie Michael’s 16mm film projections (Trip) the Light Fantastic, bringing the past into the present.

Using simple webcams and chroma key software, to capture your body movement and shapes. Bringing these films to life with patterns and soundwaves. Thinking about how old and new technologies can produce interesting effects and accidents, learning new digital skills and create a collaborative audio-visual projection.

Digital Makers is a series of digital art making workshops aimed at 8–14 year olds. These workshops are inspired by art and artists exploring a range of digital skills.

New Wave Music Festival
Jinga, Uganda
September 2016

Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison and Swordman Kitala

Performance on SoundCloud 46 min

Dubmorphology live performance featuring Kampala based MC Swordman Kitala. From the 2-4 September over 200 artists from over 30 countries performed at the Festival. Nyege Nyege is part of a Kampala based arts incubator that includes an arts residency and community studios, a record label and artist management agency called Nyege Nyege Tapes and a party crew called Boutiq Electroniq.

Support from the British Council also enabled me to collaborate with young artists (whom I had trained and worked with in May 2016) to produce a site-specific audio visual installation for the Festival.

Tate Britain
London, UK
June 2016

Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison

June’s Late at Tate Britain is themed around Winifred Nicholson’s Sandpipers, Alnmouth,1933. The painting depicts a view of a coastal scene of a picturesque Northumberland village made while the artist was on holiday.

Taking inspiration from this artwork, with its dreamy and evocative feel, muted colours, abstract imagery of sea, beach, sand dunes and a flock of seabirds flying in formation across the canvas, we’ve invited a selection of artists to create an immersive event. The evening will explore sense of place, holiday memories and the feeling of escape and being transporting to somewhere else.

London based research, production and performance group Dubmorphology will curate an immersive and sensory journey through the collection. Designer-makers ELK and composers Cassini Sound, will create a hypnotic audio-physical installation derived from data originating on the surface of the moon. Plus a new commission from graphic designer and 3D illustrator Zigor Samaniego will produce a new digital animation. Plus eclectic soulful vibes, relaxed beats and ambient textures from Melo-zed.

Late At Tate Britain: Recall

Boutiq Foundation
Kampala, Uganda
May 2016

Gary Stewart

Critical Mass was a three-week residency programme led by Digital Media Artist Gary Stewart for emerging artists from across East Africa. The Lab brought together creatives from across disciplines and backgrounds, in order to collaborate, experiment and explore their mediums in a digitalised way.

The methodology used was built around modifying and recalibrating existing media tools for a specific environment, building skills and experimental digital practices with new artists, audiences and communities.

The Lab was developed together with Boutiq Foundation a Ugandan community arts and culture incubator based in the Makindye district of Kampala. They have established Nyege Nyege Festival, a pioneering three day international music festival and set up East Africa’s first music label geared towards releasing new musical genres from the East Africa.

Artists in Residence:

Angel Mutoni
Performing Artist (Rwanda)

Awuor Onyango
Writer, Photographer, Visual and Digital Artist (Kenya)

Bwette Daniel
Photographer and Hip-Hop Archivist (Uganda)

George Gikaria
Musician, DJ and Sound Technician (Kenya)

Hibo Elmi
Filmmaker and Fashion Designer (Ethiopia-Somalia)

Reagan Kandole
Visual and Community Artist (Uganda)

Swordman Kitala
Performing Artist (Uganda)

Station House Opera 
January 2016

A series of exploratory workshops held simultaneously with artists in Gaza and London examining the ever shifting nexus between politics, borders, belonging, communication and connection.

Two places linked together using video and sound to create a reimagined 'third' shared virtual space providing the possibility to investigate what is meant by home and how it might be embodied.

Developing new hybrid narratives that emerge from imaginatively juxtaposing and superimposing people and objects in Gaza and London to create a single improvised performance space in a new imagined world not bound by the current status quo with it's own unique set of rules and future possibilities. 

Artists in Residence: Julian Maynard Smith (Director, Station House Opera), Vivianna Chiotini, Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso

Participants in Gaza: Aya Abdelrahman, Abeer Ahmed, Isa el Alem, Seddiq Felfel, Ahmed Hamza, Ali Hassany, Mahmoud Madi, Mariam Nasser, Majdal Nateel, Ismael Rozzi, Hamza Saftawy, Walid Tafesh, Amjad Abu Yaseen

Participants in London: Nora Adwan, Zoe Aiano, Tara Fatehi, Lia Ikkos, Yoko Ishiguro, Jenny Matthews, MH Sarkis, Gary Stewart, Steve Tiller, Owl Young

Producer: Victoria Lupton

Photo by Hani Mortaja © Station House Opera

Guildhall Art Gallery
July 2015 - January 2016

Curator Michael McMillian
Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990 was a purpose-built multi-media exhibition and events programme that took its impetus from the life works of Eric and Jessica Huntley and the Bogle Lâ'Ouverture Press, a publishing house as well as a pioneering Black bookshop and cultural hub they founded in 1968.  

The realisation that Britain was changing forever is no better articulated than through the lens of the pioneers of what was to become Black British cultural heritage.  The Huntleys were the publishing powerhouses that spawned a dynamic generation of cultural and political leaders, whose stories are told and celebrated for the first time in the UK.

The project will create a visual record of the socio-cultural dynamics spanning the three decades by juxtaposing archival documents relating to popular and political culture - pamphlets and posters related to community campaigns, artist movements and conscious popular entertainment, book fair flyers, LP sleeves, press clippings with original works of art: paintings, sculpture, photographs and other relevant artefacts.

Huntleys online

New Art Exchange
Nottingham, UK
October 2015

Curator Michael McMillian
Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

Sound Systems back in Da Day is a new exhibition exploring the golden era of sound system culture from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

As a black cultural form, sound systems have provided the spaces where diverse communities came together, and still come together, in the dancehall. It is important for culturally diverse communities across Britain to regains, celebrate and communicate this heritage.

Help us tell the story! We are looking for personal stories of early sound system pioneers/practioners as well as testimonies from the communities of punters/'ravers' who dressed up, went out and danced at the clubs, dances and 'Blues' parties/Shebeens where sound system played.

Find out how you can contribute.

Michael McMillian
07710342097
m.mcmillan62@btinternet.com

Tate Modern
July 2015

Writer  Gaylene Gould
Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)
Dr Sue Fox
Caleb Femi

As part of Tate Britain's Turbine Festival, the Mission//Misplaced Memory crew are docking the Sugar Ship for their second mission. This time the Data Thieves will delve into the memory of Britain's misplaced words. Which words have you misplaced and what memories do they carry?

THE MISSION
Language is memory vocalised. We can trace where we have been through the words we use and it is the job of the young to lay down new tracks. Over one day, with the help of linguists, young poets and visitors to the Sugar Ship, the Data Thieves will collect the words that have marked successive generations and changed the way English is spoken forever. 

THE INVITATION
You are invited on board to contribute your favourite words to the Sugar Ship memory bank and join a live discussion with linguist Dr Sue Fox, Queen Mary University. Stay on to hear the closing Ship's Log performance in the Turbine Hall featuring a spoken word round up of the memories performed by Caleb Femi with a live mixed soundscape by international artists dubmorphology.

THE CREW
The Data Thieves are a collaborative team of artists, curators and facilitators who travel through space and time in their sonic laboratory retrieving the misplaced memories of the universe. On board the Sugar Ship, memory and conversation are triggered through a generative installation of sonic disruptions and visual projections to inspire, provoke and connect us.

Tate Modern

Misplaced Memories, Tate Britain February 2015

Dr Sue Fox

Caleb Femi

In\visible Cities, Gorizia, Italy
June 2015

Images Aniruddha Das
Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

In\visible Cities is a five day festival of workshop, installations, live performance and shows involving artists from all around Europe exploring connections between visible and invisible cities through art and multimedia languages.

dis/placed is a new site specific audio visual performance installation exploring “outsider-ness,” solitude and exclusion using the visceral urban images of photographer Aniruddha Das. These abstracted images created from photographs of cities and environments all over Europe and in Gorizia will be accompanied by a newly constructed and orchestrated sonic piece created in situ by Dubmorphology artists Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison. Responding to the images and site of the 300m Gallery Bombi tunnel crossing the hill of Borgo Castello joining Piazza Vittoria via Giustiniani, dis/placed is the exploration of the imperceptible but powerful forces which create interdependencies between disparate people in an ever changing urban landscape.

In\visible Cities
Aniruddha Das

Image: Aniruddha Das

Hasselt, Belgium
April 2015

Exploring the impact of Miles Davis's 70s music on electronic and experimental dance music using dub bass as the foundation.

Bass Dr Das, Aniruddha Das
Electronics Bantu, Gary Stewart
Guitar Pascal Vaucel
Saxophone John Martin
Drums Hamid Mantu

Download extended band & artist info

Featuring tracks from the new live album

FRAGMENTED CITY
EARTH RISING
SHADOW STEPPA
PERIPHERAL
REBEL ASTEROID
ANDELON DUB
FUTURE MENACE
STORM IS COMING

Image: Aniruddha Das

Barking and Dagenham, London
April 2015

Photographer AF Rodrigues
Installation Gary Stewart

Between 1921 and 1936 26,000 houses were built by London County Council as part of ‘The world’s greatest public housing project’ creating the largest municipal housing estate in the world with a population of around 100,000 people, covering four square miles of former fields, heath and parkland north of Dagenham.

How do you see Becontree today?

In March 2015 People’s Palace Projects and Creative Barking and Dagenham will be bringing renowned Brazilian photographer AF Rodrigues to Becontree to run photography workshops. Produced, voted for and hosted by residents, 100 images will then make up the “Becontree Hundred” exhibition.

Simultaneously, digital artist Gary Stewart will run digital media workshops for residents who will research, re-mix and re-imagine the estate. The project will culminate in the digitised “Becontree Selfie”; a performative installation offering a unique perspective on life in the community.

For more information contact:

e  sylvan.baker@peoplespalace.org.uk
t   020 7882 8914

AF Rodrigues
People’s Palace Projects

Museum of Liverpool
April 2015

Photographer Othello De’Souza-Hartley
Producer Marc Boothe
Installation Sound Gary Stewart

A new exhibition of photography and filmed interviews exploring the communities living in Liverpool 8, an area of the city that has come to be known simply by its postcode, ‘L8’. Often used as shorthand for ‘riots and inner-city deprivation’ the exhibition challenges those preconceptions, revealing hidden stories from the people who live, work or have a passion for the area.

Photographer Othello De’Souza-Hartley's large-scale colour portraits images of individuals and groups set in significant locations reflect the city’s history of global trade, including slavery. These portraits are 21st century representations of race, culture and identity against a foundation of 300 years of immigration and settlement.   

Produced by Marc Boothe of B3 Media who has worked extensively with community groups in the area uncovering a wealth of stories dating back more than 60 years.

Photos. Sandi Hughes and Cherise Smith by Othello De'Souza-Hartley© B3 Media

Museum of Liverpool
L8 UNSEEN - Trailer
Othello De’Souza-Hartley
B3 Media

March 2015

Project Curator Paul Goodwin
Art Directors Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

Taster Film (excerpts)

African Diaspora Artists in the 21st Century (ADA21) is a major new project that is building a new archive of filmed interviews with a range of contemporary British artists with links to the African diaspora. The interviews focus in detail on the artistic strategies, concerns and motivations of these artists in the production of their work in the setting of their studios.

While the primary focus of the interviews are on the works of art and their production as described by the artists themselves, the interviews also address some critical questions that have emerged in recent years around controversial notions of ‘post-black' art.

A collaborative project by the Cultural Institute & Institute for North American Studies, King's College London with Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). 

Tate Britain, London
February 2015

Writer  Gaylene Gould
Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

A collaborative team will use research and performance, sound and visual installation to explore how culture and history shapes our intimate memories.

Anamnesis and her Sonic Crew have lost their way.

Memory gaps confuse their ship's co-ordinates while ghosts of misplaced memories leak from government archives. Countries are suing Britain demanding the reparation of their own memory banks and the crew has been guided back to Tate by a trail of sugar. In the hope of getting back on course, the crew plan to dock the SS Sugar Ship to discover the truth behind the secrets that have kept them drifting through space and time.

Over five days Anamnesis and her crew will collect and sonically re-master the memories of invited experts, gallery visitors and the building itself. Visitors are invited on board the SS Sugar Ship to participate by joining the discussions, retrieving their own lost memories and contributing their recollections to the sonic data bank.

Will this re-tune the crew’s instruments or create more memory holes?

Key Interviews:

Martyn Day
Human Rights lawyer who successfully represented the Kenyan Mau Mau people against the British government.

Dr Dele Olajide 
Consultant Psychiatrist  responsible for an acute male inpatient unit in the Psychosis Clinical Academic Group.

Dr Eyman Osman
Geneticist and specialist in gene therapy and genetic memory.

Patrick Vernon OBE
Health care professional and leading advocate for British African and Caribbean genealogical research.

Final Ritual
The character Anamnesis will perform live a fictionalised account of the Mission’s ships log. The performance will be accompanied by the misplaced memories soundscape, which will have grown with confession, analysis, reflection and rhythm over the duration of the project. 

Mission Tumblr
Tate Britain
WriteTalkListen

Photo: Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole

Central Saint Martins, London
January 2015

Producers Sonia Boyce and Paul Goodwin
Choreography Serena Korda
Sound Design Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

Curating Carnival was a procession, sound and performance event that took place in The Street in Central St Martins(CSM) coinciding with the anniversary of the first Caribbean Carnival to take place in London at the nearby St Pancras Town Hall in 1959. Curating Carnival is a follow up to the hugely successful performance The Sky is Dancing by CSM Fine Art XD Pathway students that took place in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall as part of Up Hill Down Hall: An Indoor Carnival curated by Claire Tancons in August 2014.

The Curating Carnival event at CSM continued student engagement with carnival from the Tate event by investigating carnival as an artistic practice in the broadest sense: exploring public procession, the carnivalesque, performance, the politics of the street and publicness, resistance and celebration. The event featured performances, mobile sculptures, projections and sounds from a wide range of students across several courses at University Arts London, including Fine Art and Performance Design and Practice.

UAL Chairs of Black Art & Design Present: Curating Carnival

Camberwell College of Arts, London
January 2015

Dr Keith Piper
Gary Stewart
Professor Paul Goodwin

University Arts London Chair of Black Art and Design Professor Paul Goodwin in conversation with artist and academic Dr Keith Piper (Middlesex University) and artist Gary Stewart. 

Part of the GHOSTS programme of exhibitions and events, this discussion traced an alternative genealogy of contemporary artists' exploration of technology and techno-culture in Britain through the practices of two pioneers in the field of new media art: Keith Piper and Gary Stewart. The discussion will unpacked critical notions such as ‘digital diasporas’ while discussing the impact of seminal exhibitions and projects such Keith Piper’s ‘Relocating the Remains’ (1997) and Gary Stewart’s ‘Liminal: A Question of Position’ (2009).

GHOSTS

Image: Keith Piper, Local/Stranger, 2004

Electric Palace Cinema, Hastings
December 2014

Director HKB FiNN
Cinematography  Gary Stewart

AMPLiFiER was a multimedia Spoken Word Opera combining elements of silent feature film, live poetry and live music. It told the story of  five souls (Fear, Desire, Doubt, Hope and Love) trapped in an indifferent city on a quest to find happiness.

HKB FiNN orchestrated the performers Nathaniel-Antonio Lloyd, Cherise Kirnon, Naomi Deira, Lisa Lore and Glynis LeFlore, unpicking the politics of urbanism to re-present the image of the modern African as human, intelligent and progressive.

This work was part of a wider movement that is exploring an AfroFuturistic aesthetic and seeking new ways to canonise the day- to-day realities of the African diaspora.  

AMPLiFiER was devised with the help of Yinka Shonibare MBE, Guest Projects Africa, The Royal Opera House (London), SUFA UK, Afrikaba, Gary Stewart, Edison Herbert and Alter Native Studios.

AMPLiFiER (MiniTrailer)
HKB FiNN

Tiwani Contemporary, London
November 2014

Artists Mary Evans and Emeka Ogboh
Multichannel audio installation Gary Stewart

Encoding, authoring and installing multichannel 5.1 surround sound for Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh.

A dialogue between Mary Evans and Emeka Ogboh was first established through a radio broadcast during Art Dubai 2013, in which Ogboh (who currently resides in Lagos) and Evans (who left the city as a child), discussed the rapidly evolving landscape of the Nigerian megacity. Evans’ recollection of the sites of her childhood merged with Ogboh’s current observations on his hometown to form a portrait of an ever-changing city, crossing space and time. 

Mirrors & Echoes starts where the radio conversation ended, and further investigates notions of memory in relation to place, taking as its particular focus the interface between sound and image. 

Comprising paper cut-outs, video, sound and sculptural elements, this multi-faceted collaborative work creates an imaginary space based on the artists’ recollections and current experiences of Lagos. Evans and Ogboh stitch together disparate elements in a multitude of ways, layering media and ideas so it becomes difficult to separate them. In doing so, they create an experience that highlights the intersections and instabilities of memory, history, subjectivity and place, as they evolve over time. 

Tiwani Contemporary

Tate Modern, London
August 2014

Curator Claire Tancons
Sound Design  Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

Coinciding with the Notting Hill Carnival, Tate Modern presents Up Hill Down Hall: An indoor carnival, a new performance commission guest curated by Claire Tancons that offers critical and artistic perspectives on Carnival.

Informed by the history of the Notting Hill Carnival as it reaches a milestone half-century of existence, Up Hill Down Hall offers critical and artistic perspectives on Carnival with performances for hundreds of participants by artists Hew Locke and Marlon Griffith against the backdrop of an architectural design by Gia Wolff and a soundscape by Dubmorphology (Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison) with a special intervention by Central Saint Martins Fine Arts students and recent graduates.

Up Hill Down Hall engages with Carnival as ritual of resistance, festival of otherness and performance art, and with the Notting Hill Carnival specifically as a contested site from which to reflect on notions of public space, performance and participation. It conceives of Carnival less as a theme than a medium and introduces practitioners across disciplines who draw from Carnival as a medium of artistic production and a form of social and political address.

London-based sound artists Dubmorphology remix live and recorded tracks of steel pan and calypso, reggae and punk with texts relating to the Notting Hill Carnival from Linton Kwesi Johnson to Zadie Smith, and elements from Gary Stewart’s ongoing oral history archive of the Notting Hill Carnival. The live remix, entitled Sonar, is played through a customised sound system on the bridge that crosses the Turbine Hall, alluding to sound system set ups under the Westway Bridge during Notting Hill Carnival.

Curatorial Statement
Tate

Band on the Wall, Manchester
June 2014

Direction Cheryl Martin
Moving Image  Gary Stewart and Leah Llewellyn

LISAPO in Lingala means ‘tale’ and is the time to sit, listen and hear. LISAPO – The Congolese Tales tells the powerful story of Congolese migration to Britain through music oratory; featuring song, spoken word, moving image, theatre and dance. The performance is inspired by 29 oral histories from the Greater Manchester Congolese community who has been migrating to Britain since the late 1980s as a result of the destabilisation of the country and consequent civil war.

This special performance has been created through a participatory arts heritage project with Music Director, Tyndale Thomas MBE; Libretto and Direction by Cheryl Martin; Vocal Leader, Emmanuela Macholi Yogolelo; Drum Maestro, Pat Mackman and Moving Image by Gary Stewart and Leah Llewellyn. Featuring special guests Les Sapeur Congolais – the very elegant persons of DR Congo.  

Lisapo performance at Band on the Wall (short version)

CAN
Lisapo Tales

Digital Media + Learning
December 2013

Julian Sefton-Green and Gary Stewart

In this post I want to think about our intimate relationship with various kinds of software as a way of understanding the development of skills and practices. I want to take the unusual approach of telling the story of a ‘creative life in software’ – building on Brigid Barron’s development of ‘techno-biographies’ as a way of gaining insight into learning over time and across contexts. I want us to think beyond the more self-evident fact that engaging with software is crucial in the development of all sorts of individual capabilities and competencies to how we might want to use different kinds of software across young people's learning lives.

I became interested in this theme chatting to my friend Gary Stewart – an accomplished multimedia artist. I don't know about the US but in the UK there is a popular radio program called 'Desert Island Discs' where well-known figures choose seven ‘songs’ to represent their life as if they were fictitiously marooned on a desert island. Gary and I wondered if instead of choosing this form of cultural capital we had chosen seven software programs to represent different stages of our lives. At this time of year these kinds of parlour games are popular but because access to and ownership of digital technology had marked the decades in our lives it became a way of talking about the relationship between creative affordances and creative practices. How had particular software programs changed or made possible different kinds of creative expression? And how had such potentialities inhibited, constrained or opened up different kinds of expression and communication?

Gary and I were particularly taken by the fact that we have an historical perspective on software – including writing, performing and in Gary's case music, and visual art made and imagined in pre-digital formats. It is difficult to recreate the excitement and importance of being able to do something digitally that had not been possible before: Gary for example, does a lot of VJ work which is inconceivable as a non-digital form. We recalled MacPaint and MacWrite from the 1980’s and Gary, who is a musician as well as a visual artist, was keen initially to stress the interconnectedness of early key hardware peripherals – the AgfaScan black and white scanner, facilitating desktop publishing or the Spectrum ZX81Computer & ZON X-81 Programmable Sound Generator enabling sound effect control under BASIC program control for music production. Once we had let go of our memories of early pieces of equipment the software began to roll.

In a classic geek fashion Gary divided up his knowledge around the decades and there is a certain pleasure to be derived from recalling arcane and abstruse manufacturers and brands. We won't bore you with all of the names here but a number of key features structured the list. First of all there is the question of which brands have survived and why, and this is related to the second point that early adopters explore many options in the marketplace which then contracts around key core brands. Individuals also narrate a role for themselves in the early ecology of software itself – Gary had brought back some of the first copies of Kidpix and The Playroom to the UK after his visit to San Francisco in the 1990s. He further listed six or seven early music programs of which a few like the early SoundEditPro on the Mac fell by the way but others like Sound Tools went on to become Pro Tools. This feature of tracking programs that endured albeit under different ownership is interesting. Equally older functions appear to completely disappear as they have become absorbed in new processes. So in the 1980s and 1990s the impact of publishing programs was enormous as was the interest in forms of animation but to some extent new processes have become far more integrated in current manifestations. As we looked at the lists together we could see a process of standardisation where certain programs like Photoshop come to stand for a type of activity, and where the name of the program acts as a metonym for the creative process itself. Equally the lists show the ebb and flow of the market as smaller names disappear and are absorbed by the giant software companies we know today.

Part of the point of these kinds of narratives is the learning progressions that the autobiographical narrative constructs. Gary was keen to stress that the very business oriented Lotus 1-2-3, and VisiCalc on the Apple II were absolutely fundamental in that it was working with those programs that enabled him to imagine the whole conception of programmability in the first place. Secondly, he wanted to enumerate all the different synthesiser and sampling modules and programmes as well as the technology in which they were frequently embedded, (the Emu Emax audio sampler or the Casio RX1 sampling drum machine) to show how his pre-existing interest in making music led him to explicitly experiment with and learn from the new possibilities that were emerging at that time. This approach to music making was mirrored when he took up VJ’ing in the first years of this century (ArKaos, VDMX, Modul8) but was also evident as a kind of disciplined approach in relationship to multimedia scripting and programming interactivity (Director, SuperCard, HyperCard Max/MSP). In tracing these histories we can see a movement between technological affordances (what the software can do and makes it possible to do) and creative practices (the relationship of genres and modes of communication across media that characterise cultural expression).

There is also the question of how this range and variety of software packages both posed challenges for Gary as an artist – how he learned to accommodate the changing potentialities of the software – and as a learner: how he learned to learn both the mechanics and the uses of this huge list of software programs. In his narrative the movement between repetition, contrast and comparison clearly influenced his ability to engage with and make use of new programs when they came on the market. There was something almost ‘developmentalist’ or ‘evolutionary’ in his story as generic processes worked across competing programs at the same time as commonalties made it easier to pick up new programs. Finally there was almost an idea of cumulative progression, that learning one program enables you to build on it as you move forward and this idea I think is very important for the programs that we offer to young people and how we expect them to develop similar stories of mastery and control.

From the current retrospective vantage point we could see considerable repetition, reiteration and the recapitulation of similar processes in different programs. Some of the programs like Photoshop or Cubase have stuck even when they have been rewritten from the ground upwards whilst others have vanished and yet others again promised different functionality but have ended up repeating what was already available.

Listening to this story of a creative life in software and hearing how the different programs made important differences enabling the creation of new and different kinds of output for Gary made me realise that what Lev Manovich has recently called a cultural history of software would also have resonance as a way of explaining learning and educational pathways. That the kind of biography we hope we have suggested here is one way of tracking and marking evolving skills and practices. Gary may be exceptional as an artist and as a practitioner and he certainly lived through an extraordinary period of technological development. However, we can also learn that having access to this variety and range of software, that engaging with new software cumulatively and progressively over time and by having access to a range of specialist programmes around key domains – be they music, image-based or whatever – clearly support a different quality of learning and engagement with making and expression. For me this is one of the most important implications from this life in software, that we need to be able to introduce new programs that have variety, range and difficulty for learners and that such challenges need to be at the heart of any curriculum of the future. Furthermore, given the current vogue for teaching and learning code, paying attention to software in this fashion may also be an interesting complement in any attempt to understand what learning digital media is all about.

Julian Sefton-Green
Digital Media + Learning

Banner image credit: YouMedia @Chicago Public Library http://www.flickr.com/photos/youmediachicago/3726970590

Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro
November 2013

Music João Brasil and Domênico Lancellotti
Live Visuals Gary Stewart

With musicians Taksi (João Brasil and Domênico Lancellotti) a live audio visual improvised performative reimagining of the new movements, ideas, forms and shapes that took place in Rio from bosa nova in 1958 to the tropicalia movement of 1968. 

Multiplicidade_Imagem_Som_inusitados is a multimedia visual arts and experimental sound performance festival held in Rio de Janeiro since 2005, at Oi Futuro Flamengo and EAV Parque Lage (School of Visual Arts). 

Festival Multiplicidade 2013 invited 82 artists from 12 countries who participated in performances, concerts, installations, exhibitions, book launches, workshops and discussion panels.

"The challenge here is to expand as a Festival, providing unusual presentations and experiencing new languages as the limits of the new digital media. The Festival schedules its performances with monthly intervals, a different format that provides artists new possibilities as performers. The intention is to be unique in each particular show. In addition, Multiplicidade has a plural and diversity programming, as it's name already indicates" 

Batman Zavareze_
Director / Artistic Curator Festival Multiplicidade

Multiplicidade

November 2013

Director  HKB FiNN
Cinematographer Gary Stewart

Featuring Tracey Campbell ALL ABOUT ME is a song about women who carry secret 'emotional' burdens but keep smiling anyway. This song is taken from the (PRELUDE) URBAN ROOTS mini album. The video was shot on location in London, UK and features cameos from a variety of local artists who embody a level of cool and poise that I really love and admire. 

HKB FiNN

Brazil/UK
May 2010 - November 2013

Paul Heritage in collaboration with Gary Stewart

Encounters:Transforming Lives is a practice-based research project under the direction of Paul Heritage created in collaboration with digital artist, Gary Stewart, that aims to create a live and interactive exhibition illustrating and investigating how young people transform their worlds through the arts.

In each phase of the project, the installations build on the knowledge and experience of young people.

The interdisciplinary research is driven by the following imperatives:

• investigating the capacity of digital arts to create active citizenship

• connecting young people with policy makers, in order to enhance the development of policy affecting young people

• connecting young people with public audiences, to foster dialogue and support knowledge transfer about the means by which young people seek to transform their worlds

• pursuing the enquiry with young and emerging artists, enabling them to articulate and disseminate their questions and understandings through the prototype for a multimedia exhibition that is created in the installation;

• seeking the most effective formats and platforms for enabling young people to engage in public debates though digital installation.

The project achieves its impacts by engaging with a growing range of policy-makers, artists and arts organisations. As the project progresses, its public visibility and impact increase. The cumulative databank of images and video/audio material is handed on and added to by each successive group of young artist-activists, creating a growing archive resource which is available for study at People’s Palace Projects by request.

Encountersbeyondtext
People’s Palace Projects
Paul Heritage

Bogota, Colombia
September 2013

Bass Dr Das (Aniruddha Das)
Electronics Bantu (Gary Stewart)

“Dubnoiz” is not a genre, but an attitude, an approach to sound and experimental production. Most directly, you can say it’s a form of ‘dub’-the abstracted, stripped down form of reggae featuring mostly bass and drums- which has a heavy emphasis on the use of noise and distortion, as opposed to the more ‘traditional’ dub elements of echo and reverb. Dr Das 2013

Dr Das is the bassist and co-founder of Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), the band in which he gained a reputation for playing heavyweight yet propulsive bass melodies, inspired as much by cyclical Indian ragas as by dub. He left ADF at the end of 2005, re-joining in 2013, during which time he returned to his roots in experimental and electronic, dub related music and forming Dubnoize Sound System.

Dr Das Soundcloud
Dr Das Bandcamp

SESC, Rio De Janeiro 
April 2013

Live Visuals Gary Stewart
Music João Brasil and Domênico Lancellotti

Unlimited: Arte Sem Limites was co-curated by Peoples Palace Projects and SESC, Rio as part of British Council Transform a cultural relations programme led by the British Council that spans the 4-year period of Olympic handover from London 2012 to Rio 2016, bringing together arts practitioners, policy makers and cultural organisations from both countries in a permanent exchange of knowledge and experiences.

Gary Stewart presents Encounters: Transforming Lives, where he re-mixes and re-imagines the relationship between digital technology and live performance. This project, in collaboration with musicians João Brasil and Domênico Lancellotti, is an ongoing process in which young activists create interactive digital audiovisual installations to provoke questions and challenge the power of art to transform lives.

Encounters was part of the Unlimited in Brazil programme which included; Marc Brew Dance Company, Graeae, Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz,  Lewis Gibson and Alex Bulmer. 

The Unlimited Festival was an opportunity for artists, theatre companies and dance organisations who are interested in learning about integrated work to hear from some of the best in dance, theatre, music and the visual arts. 

Transform enables artists and professionals from the arts sector in both countries to share experiences and collaborate to bring about significant creative and social change for institutions, individuals and communities.

Transform British Council
Peoples Palace Projects
SESC
Taksi (João Brasil and Domênico Lancellotti)

Bridport Arts Centre, UK
October 2012

Proboscis Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Gary Stewart and Stefan Kueppers

The new  video at BAC is a new piece combining video shot at Hive Beach with maps, scans of the seabed and archival material.  It features footage of several people whose activities bring them into contact with different cycles of life and histories of the area including a fossil hunter, an archaeologist, a member of Coastwatch and Bridport Wild Swimmers. Data on wave height, wave period and wave direction data gathered from the Channel Coastal Observatory beuy at West Bay is being used to control and modulate the ambient soundtrack that accompanies the voices of people who live, work and play on the coast.

We are showing a new 2 screen audio and video work and a series of 22 works on paper tracing the research ideas. Inspired by the notion that history looks different depending on your perspective, the video clips are randomly selected from a bank of video shot at Hive Beach along with maps, scans of the seabed, drawings and old films. It features footage of several people whose activities bring them into contact with different cycles of life of the area including a fossil hunter, an archaeologist, a kayaker, a member of Coastwatch and Bridport Wild Swimmers. 

Co-commissioned by PVA MediaLab and Bridport Arts Centre, in partnership with the National Trust, supported by Hive Beach Café

Proboscis

Tate Modern Tanks, London
August 2012

Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison, Dr Das, HKB FiNN, Gretchen Minerva Cummings, Sonia Mehta, Ramjac

Responding to the volumetric geometry, acoustic sonic quality and surface texture of the materials in the Tanks, Dubmorphology artists Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart weave together a multimedia narrative that traces different epistemic, emotional, and socio-political viewpoints.

Together with guest sonic adventurers dub basist Dr Das, poet HKB FiNN, vocalist Gretchen Minerva Cummings, Sonia Mehta and percussionist Ramjac, they create a performance laboratory which explores the relationship between past legacies and struggles with our present lives and environments through an evolving mutation of live audio visual performance in perpetual flux.

dis.so.nance forms part of Undercurrent, a series of events, installations and interventions by audio, visual, digital and performance artists.

Over eleven days the programme invites a diverse range of artists and audiences to explore the relationship and influences of subcultures upon dominant or mainstream culture. At the core is the exploration of the ‘underground’ and the under-represented. The programme will capture the nuances, signifiers and codes of the transference of counter culture, as well as providing participatory and ephemeral art platforms to examine the parallels, contrasts and connections that make or define culture.

The Tanks represent a space for new modes of experimentation and participation. Undercurrent, re-considers how the exchange of ideas, creative actions, learning and artistic collaborative practices can affect and reconfigure the role of galleries and museums of the twenty first century.

Tate Modern

Hive Beach, UK
August 2012

Proboscis Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Gary Stewart and Stefan Kueppers

A night time outdoor video and audio event featuring a specially created live musical score by local cellist Matthew Benjamin creating a mesmerising journey through the ephemeral space of flux between the land and sea the continual cycles of sun, tide and seas.

‘Storyweir’ is the outcome of the Hive Beach commission, which required artist-led group Proboscis to engage with users of the café and beach, exploring the human story of the  Jurassic coast, and how the physical and the social influence and impact upon each other. Proboscis (Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Gary Stewart and Stefan Kueppers) worked with Cultural Geographers from the University of Exeter to explore their interest in the relationship between deep time and human time, and how they are reflected in the ongoing dynamic processes and transitory human life at play on the geology of the coast.

For ExLab, Proboscis have engaged with people who use the beach, resulting in events, structures, objects and audio-visual works that echo the impact of the geology on the human experience of the place. The project title ‘Storyweir’ reflects the idea that their project is a ‘weir’ for catching stories, inspired by traditional methods of fishing – including seine netting, which was (and still is) used to catch mackerel at Hive Beach. It’s also inspired by the idea that they will catch stories from across both human time and deep geological time through their research.

In that ephemeral space of flux between the land and sea the continual cycles of sun, tide and sea effect changes larger than we can imagine but also are felt by humans on a daily basis.

LabCulture + Bridport Arts Centre Co-commission for ExLab
Working with Dr I Cooke, Dr J. Wylie, Dr N Thomas and R Ferraby from the Geographies of Creativity and Knowledge Research Group, University of Exeter

Proboscis

Tate Modern, London
July 2012

Performance: Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology), João Brasil and Domênico Lancellotti (Taksi), Dr Das, Ramjac and Gretchen Minerva Cumming.

Video: Paulo Camacho

The Biscuit Factory, London
July 2012

Director Eduardo Nunes
Producer Marc Boothe
Sound Technician Gary Stewart

Portraits of London is a short film (25 minutes) embedded in a multi-screen installation by award-winning Brazillian Artist and Filmmaker Eduardo Nunez, based on the novel ‘Portraits of a Marriage’ by Hungarian writer Sandor Marai: the story of four characters is told through the places in London they frequent. In this narrative, the places become as important as the human characters, whose lives become confused with the characteristics of the places. Using a similar creative process to that of the director Mike Leigh, Portraits of London, investigates the relationship between Londoners and places in the city, while telling the story of the characters involved in a love "quadrangle". Shown simultaneously on four screens which make up the walls of a living room, the viewer engages simultaneously with the four characters through the four "windows" onto the different London locations where they confess their stories.

Portraits of London was produced by B3 Media in collaboration with People's Palace Projects as part of Rio Occupation – a showcase of over 30 ground-breaking Rio artists occupying the vibrant streets, stages and squares of London during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Edited by Paul Heritage and Gary Stewart 
2012

Download Book

Encounters: Transforming Lives is a practice-based research project under the direction of Paul Heritage that aims to create a live and interactive exhibition illustrating and investigating how young people transform their worlds through the arts. Encounters provides access to digital technologies that enable young people to imagine new ways of looking at and playing back their lives to provoke new encounters with their own worlds. It has been created in collaboration with digital artist, Gary Stewart, and a series of groups of young people in Brazil and the UK.  The first stages of the project were funded by research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Beyond Text scheme, and the São Paulo phases by British Council Brazil as part of Transform.

The texts that are included here reflect the diverse range of people that have engaged with the project or whose work we have drawn on for inspiration. In some way each of the texts or fragments deals with the idea of art and transformation. Some of the pieces are fully-formed essays written specially for this publication, others are extracts from interviews we conducted along the way. They include the voices of academics, policy makers, artists, activists and young people themselves.

Most of them reflect on the Brazilian context because throughout this project we have looked to Brazil and its current transformations as a means of learning more about what we are doing in the UK.

The book includes three short academic essays, each of them reflecting different enounters which were staged between young people and 'public thinkers':

The links between and beyond the texts and the photographs in this catalogue are neither random nor deliberate. You are invited to make your own connections. There is a website that accompanies the project where you will find more audio-visual material and a space to make your own contribution to this enquiry:

Encountersbeyondtext

Paul Heritage

Sofia, Bulgaria
February 2012

Bass, Dr Das ( Aniruddha Das )
Electronics, Bantu (Gary Stewart)
Percussion, Ramjac (Paul Chivers) 
Sax, John Martin
Guitar, Pascal Vaucel

Deeder Zamen (Rebel Uprising Sound System)
Original MC of Asian Dub Foundation

Dr Das (Dubnoiz Quintet)
Founder of Asian Dub Foundation

DJ Soundar

Arnolfini
Bristol, UK
November 2011

Afterimage: Engagements with the Cinematic is an ICF The International Curators Forum two-day intervention at the Arnolfini, threading together responses to the multiplicity of issues that impact on the production, distribution and critical reflection of the moving image in an era of mass and intimate media. Inspirational internationally acclaimed artists, curators and agencies such as: Artangel, David A Bailey, Mike Dibb, Antony Gross, Gil Leung, Gary Stewart, and Sonia Boyce will be discussing and reflecting on the historical and contemporary impact of cinema as both an industry and scene of cultural production.

The International Curators Forum is an open conceptual network that meets to discuss emerging issues of curatorial practice in the context of key events in the international arts calendar. It offers bursaries and professional development opportunities to curators and works in partnership with key national and international bodies.

Arts Catalyst, London
April 2011 

Performance Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart

As Dubmorphology Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart perform at Arts Catalyst, London UK a live electronic set and present an audio visual tribute to the first man in space as part of a worldwide celebration of the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight. A special Kosmica, monthly social galactic gathering programmed by Nahum Mantra and endorsed by ITACCUS, the International Astronautical Federation's Committee on the Cultural Utilisation of Space. Part of a new series of galactic gatherings for earth-bound artists, space engineers, performers, astronomers, musicians and anyone interested in exploring and sharing space in original ways.

Each month Kosmica brings together the cosmically curious and culturally quirky space community for a social mix of art–space programmes - a film screening, performance or live concert with a short presentation, talk and debate about alternative and cultural uses of space.

Arts Catalyst

Morro da Providência, Rio de Janeiro
March 2011

Devised by Paul Heritage
Installation Gary Stewart

The Morro da Providência, Rio’s oldest favela, indeed the place where the word favela arrived at its modern meaning.  An improvised hillside community, claimed in 1897 by returning soldiers in fulfilment of a broken government promise to house them, it looks over the affluence of the city beneath.  It was a fitting place to begin People’s Palace Projects’ Encounters:Transforming Lives project, with an exploration by young people of how an audio-visual installation might begin to tell the stories of a territory and a community.

The three interviewees are Felipe, Bruna and Erika – three students at Spectaculu who went on to participate in a Rio-London exchange, and then became peer mentors to the São Paulo groups whose “Declaração” videos can be seen among the Actions of this project.  They were part of a group of design students at Rio’s highly-respected arts and design college who had worked for several weeks under the direction of Paul Heritage (Principal Investigator/Artistic Director) and Gary Stewart (Research Assistant/Associate Artist).  Paul directed the students to go into Providência, listen and observe: to ask questions that would open up people’s feelings about the community that had been made and remade there, record their answers, and document the sights and sounds of the territory.  In group sessions, the students shared and discussed the material they had collected and explored with Gary how VJ-ing software could open up ways that these stories could most powerfully be told and contextualised.

We did not open the project in Providência after all.  Rio’s favelas have long been contested sites, whether that contest is between rival drug gangs or between those gangs and the representatives of the City authorities responsible for public security.  In November 2010, as we prepared for the staging of the first installation, Rio’s military police force launched an aggressive invasion of one of the city’s largest favelas, Complexo de Alemão.  There were fears of reciprocal attacks by the drug gangs; tensions in local communities ran too high for us to be able to risk bringing the young students and the community together for the staging.  That November we showed the piece at Spectaculu –  our partner institution – and returned in March 2011 for the showing in Providência documented here.

Casa Amarela – the “yellow house” where the installation was projected – was an arts centre thrown open to the community of Providência by underground Parisian artist JR.  It, and the open square adjoining it, have now been built over as part of the transport modernization in preparation for 2014’s World Cup and the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games.  The right to decide which territorial interventions will be of most benefit to Rio’s communities remains contested.

There is an informative English-language article by Misha Glenny in the FT about Rio’s pacification programme, public security, urban development and gentrification and their impacts on some of Rio’s peripheral communities here.

www.encountersbeyondtext.com
Spectaculu School of Arts and Technology
Paul Heritage
Rio’s peripheral communities
JR.

Fondation Clement, Martinique
October 2010

Curator Dominique Brebion
Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

The Creole language says ici-là (here-there) doubtless to extend the forces of here towards the infinite. It often insists on ici-là minm, (right here there), nowhere else but here which is nevertheless over there or up there (whence the Creole language gets là minm, right there meaning right now, immediately) as if to make a clean break between here and its near or far surroundings.

Glissant Edouard – La saison unique in La Cohée du Lamentin - Poétique V - NRF Ed Gallimard - 2005

How do the artists of the Caribbean perceive this nowhere else which is theirs, but which remains an exotic and faraway over there whose location is vague to all but the natives ?

History is unmade by way of three interconnected projected, interactive and sonic installations that together interrogate the different forms of historical and contemporary encounters with Martinique through the exploration of historical artefacts, ephemera, photographs, everyday objects and recently filmed video and sound recordings made in situ.

Catalogue

A group exhibition with Marcos Lora Read, Alex Burke, Thierry Alet, Christopher Cozier, Anna Lee Davis, Tirzo Martha, Oneika Russel, Ebony G.Patterson, Tony Monsanto, Ingrid Pollard, Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison, Polibio Diaz.

Eastnor Castle Deer Park, UK
August 2009

VJ’s Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)
Concept Moody Boyz and Adrian Sherwood

Visuals for Big Chill, Summer of Dub, Adrian Sherwood and Tony Thorpe’s speaker-shaking concept of a musical tour from reggae to dub step and jungle to grime. Highlights included jungle legend Congo Natty and Dub Syndicate who reformed specially for their exclusive Big Chill set this year!

Moody boyz, Breakage, Jazzsteppa, Kode 9 & Spaceape, Dub Syndicate. Congo Natty

Tate Britain, London
March 2009 

DJ Jazzy B
VJs Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

In the context of the Tate Triennial 2009: Altermodern, 'Britishistory' is a series of events that investigate shifts in British art and culture. These events aim to create a space for an inter-generational exchange of ideas and cross-cultural exploration of disciplines.

Mix It Up! asks what is British music? Is there an identifiable form? How does music impact upon other forms of culture? How do our tastes and styles create a national form? Join award winning film director John Akomfrah, musicians Jazzie B, Soweto Kinch and Johnny Flynn in conversation and performance. Special guest set by Jazzie B, live visuals by Dubmorphology and DJ Enidub creates soundscapes that respond musically to the Altermodern. Free Tours of Tate Triennial and sonic trail, The Ghost in the Machine produced by Soweto Kinch and the Visual Dialogues group.

Parliament Buildings, Barbados
Febuary 2009

Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

History leaves an imprint. For this commission we have imagined that on arriving at the site for the installation in the West Wing of Parliament we find a mysterious but interesting looking device. We pick it up and nervously pull one of the many metal levers that adorn its ornate casing. It makes a sound and we hear a faint echo. It sounds like the sound effects used at a Reggae sound system. We decide to call it the original Echo Box. It begins to glow and we accept the invitation to turn one of the dials. The Echo Box splutters into life and in addition to sound we now see that there are also images being projected onto the walls. They appear to be traces of historical events which briefly tune in as we turn the dial with different degrees of clarity and resolution. It seems we have encountered a device that can reveal the imprint left by past events. We manage to get the Echo Box to briefly tune into three periods of time before it returns to its dormant state.

Past trace. Objects and fragments of chains, shackles and personal artifacts from traumatic events which have shaped the wider Caribbean become visible and occasionally coming into sharp focus.

Recent Trace Archival photographic images of Barbados between 1920 to 1970 begin to emerge and the audio visual signal from the Echo Box seems to have a much clearer impression of the recent past.

Present Trace The Echo Box now fully locks into the present receiving a very strong dominant signal picking up images and sounds from satellites, radio television, advertisements and computers.

Black Diaspora Information

New Art Exchange, UK
October 2008

Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology) & Obinna Nwosu

Commissioned for the opening exhibition at Nottingham's new flagship building New Art Exchange which opened in September 2008, this sonic installation created by Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison and Obinna Nwosu interrogates the traces of evidence, meanings and conclusions formed as a consequence of teenage deaths at the hands of their peers.

Investigating space (conurbation vs. the country), architecture (physical, psychic and cultural infrastructure), time (history and memory) and place (economics and class) Bitter Thickest Blood presents varying perspectives on these attacks; music, spoken word, voice-over, soundtrack and atmospheric composition that present pieces of a jigsaw that seem to constantly mutate making a complete picture difficult to apprehend.

Bitter Thickest Blood takes a more forensic approach in its study of evidence, testimony and commentary. Music expresses a continuum of dialogues engaged in (and not engaged in) reflecting the social-cultural space occupied and being negotiated by (particularly) young Black teenagers and their communities, drawing a relationship between the local and global consumption of these forms, where similar 'phenomena' occur in a plethora of 'failed states'.

Dr Eddie Chambers
This is Nottingham

Acknowledgements

Cath March, Dr Das, Esther Baker, Director - Synergy Theatre Project, Excentral Tempest, Indie Choudhury, Poulomi Desai, Remi Stewart, Tahera Azizt, Thomas Crosbie aka PACE, VJ Coco, DJ FeelFree - Visionary Underground, Dr Yasmeen Narayan

Southbank, London
June 2008

VJ's Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)
Concept Moody Boyz and Adrian Sherwood

Visuals for The Dubstep Chronicles part of the Massive Attack Meltdown Festival that took place in London, UK at the Southbank Centre’s Front Room. The event featured some of the biggest names in dubstep including Mala (Digital Mystikz), Kode9, Skream, Pinch, Horsepower, Jazzsteppa and the Moody Boyz.

Londonist Live

Never underestimate the power of bass. This is a lesson that the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall learned as pieces of aluminium cracked and began to break free from the ceiling on Tuesday night as The Dubstep Chronicles rumbled its way through Meltdown 2008. No one was ever in any danger of being injured, but the low end frequencies compromised the building's structural integrity enough to force organisers to err on the side of caution and relocate the revelers to the dancefloor of the Royal Festival Hall. Everyone in attendance already was already enamoured with South London's signature sound, but this reaffirmed that affection: our music had the power to move buildings.

Whilst the first two DJs we had the good fortune of seeing warmed the crowd up nicely, it wasn't until Kode9 took to the decks in Royal Festival Hall that the party truly got started. Listed on the bill as simply Kode9, we received the best possible surprise a punter could hope for when his lyrical partner-in-crime, The Spaceape, joined the DJ on stage. Those familiar only with their debut album, Memories of the Future, were in for a second surprise, for whereas that album is a brilliant slow ride through haunted streets, this live experience took up the tempo and drove dancers into a frenzy. With so much to say that he couldn't stand still, The Spaceape flowed through his rhymes from one end of the stage to the other as Kode9 spun increasingly more devastating tracks.

A competent DJ simply mixes records, but a great one connects with their audience. Once again Kode9 proved that his skills as a producer are equal if not surpassed by his abilities as a DJ. The formerly polite gathering of dance music fans sipping beers after work crumbled away into the most action that the Royal Festival Hall is likely to have ever seen, with not a still foot in the house. We took our photos (see The Spaceape, pictured above) and quickly ditched our cameras to work up a sweat with everyone else.

The night continued as Jazzsteppa assumed control of the room on laptop and trombone, backed by a live drummer. Though it saddened us to have to leave in the middle of their set, our beat-lashed brains were dancing all the way across the bridge to Embankment and through the entire Northern Line ride home. So far Massive Attack have curated an amazing Meltdown and the festival is barely half over. Not only have they shown us their diverse range of influences through gigs featuring Gong and Yellow Magic Orchestra, but they've also demonstrated that they still have their finger on the pulse of the future by arranging a night to showcase a genre of music that we Londoners are proud to call our own.

Talwar Gallery, New York 
April 2008

Alia Syed and Gary Stewart

Download the interactive piece 365MB

A Story Told is a love story; a woman sits in a roadside cafe recounting her quest through time to find perfect union with her lover. The subaltern voice details a journey across geographical boundaries and time, where documented evidence of origins is of little consequence. The imagery is constructed from two locations, the face of the artist herself and a cafe situated on the periphery of London. Through Syed's rigourous framing combined with her sophisticated use of sound and text the cafe transmutes into various imagined locations around the world.

This interactive film designed by Gary Stewart and Alia Syed and written, directed and performed by Alia Syed is made up of a series of triptychs that will play automatically in sequence. You can interact within this over arching order and discover various alternative routes by clicking on any one of the sections within each triptych. Each screen (left, middle and right) has a set amount of variables before it returns to the opening excerpt, however, if you alternate between a left, right or middle click other patterns will emerge.

Original Gallery Version produced by Ioanna Karavela, cinematography, Tanya Syed, Noski Deville, Peter Emery, edited by Theo Prodromidis, sound mix Athanasios Argianas.

Alia Syed
Talwar Gallery

FACT and Arnofilni, UK
2007

Commissioned by The Otolith Group
Installation Gary Stewart

Conceived and designed by artist Gary Stewart and commissioned by The Otolith Group as part of The Ghosts of Songs, the first exhibition devoted to the work of the Black Audio Film Collective, one of the most distinguished artist groups to emerge from Britain in recent years.

Materialities is intended as a space for visitors to re-work and re-appropriate archival material functioning as a space which emphasises multiple points of entry to facilitate new lines of enquiry.. Audiences are invited to participate in the construction of memory, history and the future through intervention in these media.

Interventions resembles a cutting room in that it offers the potential to produce change in what is viewed or heard. By exploring the ways in which the Black Audio Film Collective approached the construction of their films and video works, it will allow audiences multiple modes of participation in the field of artistic reworking of archival material.

Viewers are invited to re-work images via the interface of the Montage Mixer which contains sound files and photographic stills from the The American Image, Photographs from the National Archives 1860-1960, available online from the National Library of Congress. A continuous projection of BAFC screen tests immerses users of the Montage Mixer in the movement of images.

The Ghosts of Songs 
A Retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective 

Inaugurated in 1983 and dissolved in 1988, the seven person Black Audio Film Collective is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artist groups to emerge from Britain in recent years. From their base in East London, John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson and Edward George produced award winning film, photography, slide tape, video, installation, posters and interventions, much of which has never been exhibited in Britain. The Ghosts of Songs is the first retrospective to explore this body of work. Curated and produced by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith Group, it reveals the Collective as resolutely experimental, defiantly articulate artists, dedicated to engaging with the past, present and future of memory, media and moving image.

National Maritime Museum, London
November 2007 

Installation Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology)

Atlantic Worlds is a new permanent gallery in the National Maritime Museum, London UK. The gallery explores the interrelationship, connections and exchanges created between Britain, Africa and the Americas from 1600–1850 and looks at the impact of empire on three continents.

Paintings, prints and drawings, decorative arts and ethnographic artefacts are amongst the 220 objects from the Museum’s extensive collections showcased in the new gallery.

Atlantic Worlds replaces the Museum’s former Trade and Empire gallery and is planned as one of a pair of complementary galleries. The partner gallery will examine the world of the Indian Ocean and will replace the current Art and the Sea gallery.

The gallery presents four main themes:

Exploration and Cultural Encounters 
Trade and Commerce 
Enslavement and Resistance 
War and Conflict

These themes reveal how geographical exploration and the navigation of the Atlantic opened up new trade routes from the early 17th century onwards and brought Europeans into contact with different cultures, setting in motion a dynamic of conquest and exploitation, as well as trading and cultural exchanges.

The Barge House, London
June 2004 

Performance Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison

The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) opening in 2004 took place over 50 days from 3 May to 21 June in venues as varied as the Laban Centre, the Science Museum, a London park, an allotment and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). I was one of 100 Londoners invited to give testimony to the question. "What is theatre to you?" Connected in diverse ways to the performing arts, the Enquirers were an intriguingly mixed bunch, ranging from the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company to a 14- year-old pupil at Holland Park School, and from a Buddhist monk who is the caretaker of the London Peace Pagoda to the chair of the British Council.

The testimony could take whatever form you liked a lecture, a performance, or even an installation. I invited artist Trevor Mathison to join me in creating a dub performance installation at the Barge House affectionally known as a 'theatre squat' on the South Bank.

2002 

Edited by Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard
“Digital Diaspora: Young People, Technology and Contested Spaces” by Gary Stewart

Gary Stewart Chapter
Download Chapter PDFs

This anthology published by The Rockefeller Foundation features essays on community cultural development theory and practice from twenty-two authors based in fifteen different nations, representing a wide range of disciplines, backgrounds and outlooks, yet united in using their creative talents to educate, mobilize and empower their communities to withstand the homogenizing forces of globalization.

The book itself emerged from a conference held at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy where the Foundation arranges international meetings each year where expertise from around the world is brought together to analyse, debate and plan actions to address global concerns.

Some of the aims of this conference were to:

Exchange information and ideas about cultural responses to accelerating globalisation.

Identify assets and obstacles of community cultural development practice as a response to the forces of globalisation.

Identify priorities for action to support the preservation and promotion of diverse cultures and of democratic participat

Arlene Goldbard

Channel 4 UK
October 1994

Computer Game  Gary Stewart and Marc Boothe

The computer game Demon Barber II (Turbo) in this episode of the hit comedy series Desmond’s screened on Channel 4 in October 1994 and was created with the multimedia application authoring platform Macromedia Director. 

The game was made possible because of the inspired work of the legendary John Henry Thompson the inventor of the Lingo programming language used in Adobe Director and a former Chief Scientist at Macromedia.

John Henry Thompson
 

ICA
London, UK
1993

Soundtrack on SoundCloud 9 min

Live performance by Gary Stewart and Aniruddha Das for 'Forensic Fictions' performance at ICA in 1993 by Stuart Taylor / Shaheen Merali commissioned as part of the programme curated by Keith Khan.

Channel 4 UK
1992

Director Diane Bailey
Camera Gary Stewart

Short extract from Rock 'n' Roll Jordan
Adapted from the stage play Rock 'n' Roll Jordan

Written by Stuart Brown and Paul Moore
Performed by Paul Moore
Camera Gary Stewart
Sound design Pete Yates and Gary Stewart
Sound Sharon Keatley
Screen writer, off-line editor & director Diane Bailey

12" Vinyl's
1987

Tracks Aniruddha Das and Gary Stewart
Producer Andrew Campbell

Recorded at the Marcus Garvey Centre studio in Nottingham.

Tilt
Massacre

The Track's Tilt and Fari were created using a Roland TB303 Bass Line, Alesis HR-16 Drum Machine and Midipaint sequencing software plus JamBox 4 midi interface from Southworth Music Systems running on a Apple MacPlus with 1 MB ram of memory and a 800 KB drive for storage all held together and synchronised via a Roland MSQ 100 polyphonic sequencer.