WHAT MATTERS (THE SCATTERING), 2300 suspended fragments of hand blown glass bubbles, steel, projectors. 13m x 5m x 4m (2017) Photo credit: Matthew Andrews for Artichoke Trust

WHAT MATTERS TO SHUSTER + MOSELEY?

Claudia Moseley and Edward Shuster come from contrasting backgrounds in fine art and philosophy, but share a particular interest in how our experiences of reality are framed. They began collaborating in 2007 after meeting on a protest site in the Brecon Beacons, where they lived in a tree in order to oppose the laying of a gas pipeline. Their joint practice creates light-mobiles, sculptural installations and immersive, meditative environments reflecting on the nature of consciousness and technology. What Matters, Shuster + Moseley’s biggest installation to date, uses 2,300 precisely-positioned fragments of glass to form a cosmic environment derived from computer modelling of how the universe began. The audience has the chance to project themselves into the origins of everything leading up to how they think about their own presence in the universe. What Matters is a finalist in the 2020 CODAawards, which will be announced in August and showcased in Interior Design magazine.

QUIETUDE: IN-FINITIES, Hand cut glass, steel, LEDs. 5m x 5m (2018) Photo credit: Katharina Kritzler for Arte Luce — QUIETUDE: IN-FINITIES, Hand cut glass, steel, LEDs. 5m x 5m (2018)
Photo credit: Katharina Kritzler for Arte Luce

What is the inspiration behind your science - art crossover?

Scientific observation provides us information, which is always the exposure of the light of the world to consciousness. This structure also underpins the communication, simulation and imaging technologies that have now become so ubiquitous in our daily lives. So we are thinking about cosmological ideas, how our world comes into being, but also asking how we develop knowledge of and influence the world, which today means to play with the fabric of the contemporary age: the mediation technologies of light and glass that inform our life-world minute by minute, enframing and coordinating the relations between the individual and the environment. It is this thought that has led us to think more about neuroscience, and we have recently collaborated with a number of neuroscientists alongside super resolution imaging specialists for a project that considers brain plasticity in relation to mind / brain / computer interfaces. What fascinates us here is how plasticity has a double connotation: both to give and receive form, which represents how the brain receives sensory information but also builds our world. Stemming from complementary research into meditation and psychedelics, we think similarly about artworks as being able to play with the plasticities that surround conscious apprehension. Artworks can operate in this in-between space, between an individual consciousness and its surrounding environment — by interfacing light, they can act as meditative instruments or satellites that can tune a particular ambience or atmosphere.

ZEPPELIN, Suspended hand blown glass, steel (2017) Image credit: Shuster + Moseley

What are the creative, technical, and scientific processes involved in the work?

Our work is underpinned by collaboration, with each project providing us the opportunity to bring a unique set of elements into play, and we have been fortunate to have the opportunity to work cross-disciplinarily with some world-renowned scientists in neuroscience, cosmology and imaging technologies, as well as architects, engineers and technicians. But we tend to mine the same mediums because behind diverse conceptualisations lies the same structure of information exposed to consciousness, which can be described by the interfacing of light. So we always tend towards techniques that deconstruct imaging apparatuses, suspend glass in cones of light to produce optical effects and geometrically consider the dimensionality of the lens and screen. Site-specificity is also key to how we like to think about projects. This may entail trying to understand the unique qualities of light and poetics of space unique to an environment, so we can see how a work can be tuned to that space to create a particular effect, or it could be something more specialised.

For example the medieval church of St Oswald’s provided the setting for What Matters, and its iconic William Morris stained glass windows gave us a fascinating juxtaposition to reflect on contemporary cosmology. The piece looked at how matter evolved, how we model or simulate knowledge and what it means to be conscious. We developed the project in collaboration with the Institute for Computational Cosmology who helped us to model the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) or ‘scattering of light’ and stages of cosmic evolution from the very early stages of the universe just after the Big Bang. Physically, the work was integrated into the space through parametric modelling, enabling us to suspended thousands of hand-blown coloured glass fragments in specific coordinates according to a spectrum of spherical sections derived from the CMBR. This gave us an incredible precision, such that a researcher was able to identify in the artwork the specific part of the CMBR that he was modelling in the lab. White light was ‘painted’ on-site through each coloured fragment, which was allowed to turn naturally on its axis, filling the church with ever-changing spectral optical projections. As more visitors filled the church, the piece became more alive with kinetic optics caused by bodily movement, heat and breath rotating the glass. By mapping the birth of light in the universe, the work looks at the meaning of computational simulation, projecting light through the glass to introduce the aspect of consciousness into the model and inviting the question: “What Matters?”

What are you working on currently?

We are developing geometries for new prismic forms that create amazing spectral dimensional optics for some large-scale permanent installations in Europe and the US. We are fascinated by spectrality as a kind of active metaphor for altered states of consciousness, so these installations are snapshots of an ongoing project to relate geometries of material interfaces to geometries of light and their resulting conscious effects in a specific spatial setting. We are also spending a lot of time in the darkroom developing techniques to capture the tonalities of light we create in these light paintings in print form. It’s an amazing process because when we are in an environment, exposed to the light effects, it has a particular effect on our perception, like we are somehow photosensitive, so it’s fascinating to study the phenomena of exposure with this in mind. We’re also always researching new connections and investigating what new information forms we’re exposed to through media, and are currently spending some time investigating Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

MICROCOSMOS, Virtual environment (2019) Image credit: Shuster + Moseley

What new aspects of science and technology are you interested to explore for future projects?

We are increasingly fascinated by the ways in which internet culture develops new forms of disorientation. This has got us thinking about alienation more generally - how new technologies open the possibility for types of experience that are distinctly post-human. There are a group of technologies that are particularly resonant in this space, which will inform our work going forwards (such as the large-scale optics of satellite communications and surveillance, algorithmic mediation and neural interfaces). In some sense we are all being exposed to the alien light of technology, in that we are feeling more and more disorientated even as we see the world in higher definition, or can simulate our environment, or map the brain in nano scale. So our future work is going to revolve around these paradoxes of orientation and disorientation; focus and distortion in the lights of the coming technocene.

Where can we find your work?

We currently have a light-mobile on display at Rosenfeld Gallery in London and we are doing a larger exhibition with them next year. Later this year we will be showing work at Artissima art fair in Turin, and will be installing a major new work at the next Venice Biennale, now rescheduled for 2022.

WHAT MATTERS (THE SCATTERING) 2017

03 SPOTLIGHT: SHUSTER + MOSELEY

WHAT MATTERS TO SHUSTER + MOSELEY?