How do you get an installation out into the world?

How to get exhibited is still an ongoing mystery to me, but I will say that having past work that has succeeded means people are more likely to accept new work based on a diagram and description. Generally, having a video of a piece makes it much more likely for people to want to show it. The main place things are shown is in festivals, more than galleries or museums. Getting work into a festival is a question of practical logistics: How many people are going to experience it and how much space and resources does it demand? And then festivals tend to conform to bigger trends – sometimes a bit too much I think as then they end up all showing quite similar works. When we made Cave of Sounds, DIY hacker culture and its connection to grassroots activism was in the air. Today, the focus is the environment, decolonisation, and social justice. Tomorrow there will be other things.

Then, there’s a lot of graft, and a lot of that graft is much easier when you’re younger than when you’re older. I don’t think I could go through the Cave of Sounds process today like I did back then. I’m very happy I did it back then.

What specifically about the Cave of Sounds do you think made it work?

The first shocking success of Cave of Sounds is that when we built it we had like a team of eight, and I had a very small fee because I was doing this artist residency, but everyone else was a volunteer on that project or collaborating artists, but unpaid. And we worked together for eight months to bring it together.

A lot of people came to the first meeting but from the second meeting, the people who turned up from that point forward were the eight people making the work who stuck through to the end. I think there’s something remarkable about that. Something about the core idea of the work really resonated with those people, and I think we got really lucky with them. And there was a community that they were embedded in as well. But the fact that everyone might made it to the end, just like shows that there was something kind of magical in the nature of the work and the context of that combination of people.

So a work like Cave Sounds was possible because we had a lot of people who were very passionate, and we had a diversity of skills, but we also had like a bit of an institutional name behind us. We had a small budget as well, but the budget was very small, and most of the budget did not pay for the work. The budget covered some of the materials, really, but a significant amount of labour went into that piece, and it came from people working for passion.

Do you have a dream project or a desire for something you would like to do in the future?

For the past few years I’ve been exploring how to use AI to interpret the moving body so that I can create physical interaction without introducing any assumptions about what kind of movement the body can make. So if I’m making an instrument by mapping movement sensors to sound, I’m not thinking ‘OK this kind of hand movement should make that kind of sound’ but instead training an AI on many hours of sensor data where I’m just moving in my own natural way and asking it ‘What are the most significant movements here?’

I’m slightly obsessed with this process. It’s giving me a completely different feeling when I interact with the machine, like my actions are no longer mediated by the hand of an interaction designer. Of course, I’m still there as a designer, but it’s like I’m designing an open space for someone rather than boxes of tools. I think there’s something profoundly political about this shift, and I’m drawn to that because it reveals a way of applying AI to liberate people to be individually themselves, rather than using it to make existing systems even more efficient at being controlling and manipulative which seems to be the main AI risk I think we’re facing right now. I could go on more as well – moving from the symbolic to the embodied, from the rational to the intuitive. Computers before AI were like humans with only the left side of the brain. I think they make humans lose touch with their embodied nature. AI adds in the right side, and some of the most exciting shifts I think will be in how we interact with computers as much as what those computers can do autonomously.

So far, I’ve been exploring this with dancers, having them control sounds in real-time but still being able to dance as they dance rather than dancing like they’re trapped inside a land of invisible switches and trigger zones. And in my latest interactive installation Self Absorbed I’ve been using it to explore the latent space of other AI models, so people can morph through different images by moving their bodies. But the dream project is to expand this into a larger multi-person space, a combined virtual and physical realm that lets people influence their surroundings in all kinds of inexplicable ways by using the body. I want to make this and see how far people can feel a sense of connection with each other through full-body interfaces that are too complicated to understand rationally but are so rich and sensitive to the body that you can still find ways to express yourself.

Cave of Sounds was created by Tim Murray-Browne, Dom Aversano, Sus Garcia, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel Lopez, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas, and Kacper Ziemianin with support from Music Hackspace, Sound and Music, Esmée Fairbairne Foundation, Arts Council England and British Council.

To find out more about Tim Murray-Browne you can visit his website or follow him on Substack, Instagram, Mastodon, or X.