Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up in a small suburb connected to Sydney called North Rocks in the west away from the coast.  It was mixed, lower middle class and solid middle class in other areas. I found it exciting at times and desperately boring at times as well. I now live in London and mostly spend my time in the Southeast of London.

Shaun Gladwell Studio

Where did you go to school and what did you study?

I went to a state school in North Rocks and then after graduating I went to an art school in Sydney called Sydney College of the Arts. I stayed there for a few years, got an Honors degree and then jumped to an another art school.  

My Masters study was at the College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales.  I studied painting although by the time I left Sydney College of the Arts, I was already experimenting with video and other technology so for my Masters degree I was mostly moving between lots of mediums.

What does your workspace / desktop / studio look like?

I’ve got a physical studio space in Southeast London that’s connected to a gallery space called the Drawing Room.  It’s a medium sized space with a beautiful view of London. It’s very much a painting studio. It’s really messy, there are big unstretched canvas on the wall.  There’s oil, acrylic, aerosol, it’s a real mess. I do work in VR through other studio spaces.

When did you start working creatively with technology?

A lot before officially studying video performance and installation. I was creatively using technology in my painting process. I was interested in taking reproductions of paintings and scanning them, altering their dimensions and then re-painting those manipulated images through Photoshop.  

The Photoshop image of say a distorted Gainsborough or a Reynolds painting from British society portraiture going back to the 1700th or 1800th century would then become the proprietary sketch for a very detailed painting. So that’s probably when I started looking at this interface or this connection or somehow a conversation between technology and something more traditional.  

Self Portrait Spinning and Falling in Paris, 2016 Single channel High Definition video, 16:9 (installed 4:3), colour, silent

In 2009-10 you were the official Australian War Artist and the first to use video for your project. Can you describe your experience working on the ground with the Australian military in Afghanistan and talk about the process of creating Double field/viewfinder (Tarin Kowt)?

This commission with the war memorial  was very different for me. I was heading into a very difficult, unknown space and couldn’t control the elements around me like I do here in this studio or like I think I’m doing in this studio.

To work in an environment like that required a different kind of thinking. I wanted to explore ideas that I already had in my practice so that’s where Double field/viewfinder came from which was really me taking this technology into the theater of war but also knowing that technology was entirely integrated into that experience and supporting that experience and probably most of the technology I was using was actually developed through military objectives.  

Video recording technology and digital video was so familiar to a lot of the soldiers because they are technologists. I decided to hand cameras over to them and let them record video.  It ended up becoming quite intense because the soldiers took on the project as if their lives depend up on it. It almost was like a military drill so that was quite interesting for me and then letting the soldiers know that it was an experiment and getting their feedback after was equally important.

‘Double Field/Viewfinder’ by Shaun Gladwell (2009-10).Photo: Department of War Studies, King’s College London

In 2016 you co-founded an Indie VR Content Collective with producer Leo Faber called Badfaith. You’ve mentioned the name of the collective is a reference to the Sartrean philosophical concept. Do you believe VR can be an antidote to certain social forces that cause people to act in bad faith? How do these ideas factor into your practice?

Firstly, the name BadFaith is connected to the concept of Jean Paul Sartre as well as Simone de Beauvoir.  Each philosopher or thinker has versions or signs and symptoms of ‘bad faith’ within their thinking or within their ideas around the concept so it can be quite nuanced and complex to talk about ‘bad faith’ depending upon who I’m  footnoting or referencing but I think technology can also potentially generate bad faith as well just depending upon how the technology is used. Like any technology if it’s being used as a weapon or a tool for something else.

The same technology has very different outcomes and effects and I think that the fact that bad faith was always about simulating a kind of presentation of self or position even down to the occupation of the waiter as Jean Paul Sartre’s famous example goes, then that immediately becomes relevant to technology like VR which is a very powerful simulator that we all now have access to as consumers rather than it being locked up in university research labs or tech developers so we’re going to see all kinds of different forms of bad faith in a kind of hard boiled sort of I guess bare life to use Giorgio Agamben’s  term in relation to VR.

Virtual reality pioneers Shaun Gladwell and Leo Faber talk Badfaith Collective

What projects are you currently working on?

Good question.  I’ve got a few long term projects related to shows and a few little ones that are more like doodles.  I do some sketching in video. I go out and ride my bike and follow the line on the street and it’s kinda like a video drawing. I’m really excited about doing more of those in London, really simple raw works.  I still draw, still like to printmake and paint. But I love VR and AR.

I’m trying to run that full spectrum. I  don’t want to lose out on the idea of working with materials and using substance and stuff and getting dirty.  Like in VR sometimes I can feel like it’s just too much of a pure space which does not reference the gunk, junk and the abject reality of my body or the world.  

Have you done any work in AR? Do you find VR or AR to be a more compelling medium? Why?

I’m developing an idea for a show in AR now.

The distinction between AR and VR is quite enormous.  VR completely arrests your sense of sight and hearing and when you start to include kinetics and haptics then you aren’t given a frame outside of the frameless space you’ve been immersed within while AR still gives you the reference physically and optically and and conceptually to your immediate environment as it then starts to augment that space so you still have some reference to that space if it’s to be defined as AR.  So I think they are so different for me given those kinds of boring different textbook definitions. Some ideas could be better wrapped up in VR and others in AR.

In a field where hardware and software can quickly become obsolete, how do you approach documentary and archival processes for your work?

Usually I’m sorta just hopelessly producing work that will very quickly be its own ruin because that sort of archival and documentary process has changed.  I’m only just now bringing it all in to a central nervous system but then it would of course be better managed through you guys in terms of the digital phase which is great.

It’s amazing to start off in art school and go from prints to slides you put a in projector right through to this system that you guys are working on. I think it’s an incredible arc as to how I’ve used technology to archive my work or to document the way that it’s been shown from a slide projector to the cloud in the space of my professional life and student years.

Who are some contemporary or historical new media artists that you admire? What are some of your favorite works?

Caravaggio’s use of optics back in the day.   Interesting to think of these early examples of people who have used technology.  Galileo’s drawing of the moon after he developed the telescope are some of the most beautiful images I can think of from the sides of both art and science.

In terms of new media artists, I  like everyone, Raqs Media Collective to Pipilotti Rist.  I’m interested in why people are using technology and sometimes I’m also interested in the result but there is always some interest to me as to why people are picking up the camera and trying to make episodic TV series and calling it art or making a series of elaborate performances around their sculptures and calling that video.  Probably the one artist who I really love is Stelarc the Australian guy who auments his body with technology.

Interview by Pau Waelder

Taking cues from 19th-century landscape painting, 20th-century cinema, and 21st-century planetary research, Kelly Richardson (b. 1972, Canada) crafts video installations and digital prints that offer imaginative glimpses of the future that prompt a careful consideration of the present. Her work HALO I (2021), part of a trilogy in which a pleasant summer moon becomes an unsettling reminder of the consequences of climate change, is featured in our recent artcast Anticlimactic, a selection of works from the eco-friendly NFT art community a\terHEN.

How can art address the climate emergency in a way that inspires, if not action, at least reflection?

It is not an easy subject, but it’s necessary to speak to it if we have any hope of addressing it. Until this point, on this precipice, we’ve allowed terrifying futures to be ushered in despite the predictions of so many. Perhaps we have allowed this in part because we couldn’t visualize or understand these futures from an experiential point of view. I try to offer this window of understanding through my work. I create potential futures for people to experience, to encourage reflection on current priorities and where those are leading us as a species. Hindsight is 20/20.

Art can help to connect the head and the heart. When emotions are triggered, change is possible. Most of us would react to ensure our survival if faced with an immediate threat. The response to climate change needs to mirror this. Reading a text for an exhibition that I’m in later this summer, curator Jessie Demers writes “artists and activists are both adept at [the] practice of observing the world, responding emotionally, forming a vision and expressing it through action, with no guaranteed outcome. This is how new worlds are built.” Great art allows us to see and understand the world differently. Through that shift in consciousness, hope lives.

You have described some of your works as “collapsed narratives in a singular landscape” that allow viewers to draw their own conclusions. How do you decide which elements to put forward, how to play with ambiguity?

I refer to this as “calculated ambiguity”. The works don’t offer a completely open narrative. Rather, they offer enough information that viewers can unpack and make sense of depending on their outlook. There are always multiple ways to read them. One reading or understanding of what you’re looking at might be quite terrifying in its implications, while other readings are less so. This is deliberate, to allow for viewers to personalize their experience with and understanding of the work to a point. 

When thinking through ideas, image construction, colors used (some of which act as indicators, the purple sky in Embers and the Giants, for instance), sound, etc… it’s always a juggling act of including enough information that leads interpretations towards this set of potential explanations. “How” I arrive at the right elements to juggle for each work is a little trickier to answer. Each work is a puzzle for me, in some sense. I consider every aspect of each work with regards to what it’s doing, or needs to do to support the narratives or push the overall feeling of it towards the unnerving end, or towards the beautiful.

The aesthetics and ideals of Romanticism seem to inspire some of your work, in terms of the notion of beauty and the Sublime, as well as a sense of “beautiful tragedy.” Which role do beauty and tragedy play in your work?

Yes, it’s apocalyptic sublime for the 21st century, at the other end/side of large-scale unchecked industry, and the initial fears expressed by painters and poets in the late 18th and early 19th centuries about the potential fallout of the Industrial Revolution. I use beauty as a vehicle for the delivery of deep concerns about where we’re heading as a species. Beauty invites viewers to engage with otherwise very difficult subject. Tragedy in the work is located in the truth of what we’ve wrought, the conditions within which we now find ourselves, and the urgent call for us to collectively face it in order to address it. After decades of scientific warnings riddled with predictions of what life might be like in the future, our path hasn’t changed course. We’re already experiencing extreme weather events associated with climate change. The future is now and the window to act, to avoid the worst of what will come, is quickly closing.

“Art can help to connect the head and the heart. When emotions are triggered, change is possible.”

We find several layers of reality and fiction, of video footage and digital animation in your work. For instance, in The Great Destroyer you have not altered the original footage, while in Leviathan you add digital effects to the video, and then in Mariner 9 you create a fully digital landscape, with real elements reproduced in painstaking detail. What determines this relationship between reality and fiction? 

This is such a great question, mainly because I’m still working through it myself. With The Great Destroyer, footage of the forest itself was enough. Any extra visual intervention on my end seemed unnecessary. For Leviathan, the location itself is important historically regarding our relationship to fossil fuels and its many associated environmental catastrophes. Using actual footage of the site, then, points to this truth directly. Caddo Lake, where it was filmed, is the site for the first through water oil exploration in human history. Simultaneously, the cypress forest is so stunning that I could never do it justice – particularly at that time in terms of software capability – if I attempted to recreate it in 3D. The effects, in this case, necessarily shifted viewers’ focus from the stunning landscape to questioning what was happening in the water. 

In other cases, as you’ve mentioned, creating everything in 3D was needed. For instance, in Mariner 9 I wasn’t able to film on Mars, but I could set out to create a realistic experience of Mars in 3D using topographical data from the planet, which is what I set out to do. Making that work, I also rather enjoyed not having to play by elements outside of my control, such as weather or sun location. A blend of physical limitation, the realization that I could offer a realistic experience of Mars on this planet and the value of that, and on a practical level, having complete control over the landscape. How I approach each work then is largely determined by the idea itself and what I feel best serves it.

Further, much earlier in my practice, I spoke of this more than in recent years, but I’ve always been concerned with our understanding and by extension, our appreciation of the natural world in relation to constructed environments where truth is often difficult to locate. For decades, we’ve “understood” the world through screens which offer a complete disconnect from our relationship to the natural systems which sustain us. I have serious concerns that over time, we’re diluting our appreciation through this rupture, further amplifying generational amnesia when we desperately need to be moving in the opposite direction. The situation globally is now so dire and yet, I’m not sure how much of the public truly understands how grave it is. 

Quoting Lyn Richards in a recent review of my work, “Richardson courts irony by turning the same digital media that potently enables our detachment from the natural world into a powerful tool for examining the myth of endless growth driving humanity’s misguided labors toward a catastrophic future.” I deliberately communicate these concerns through the digital hoping to redirect the focus of our detached gaze towards the physical planet. 

“I use beauty as a vehicle for the delivery of deep concerns about where we’re heading as a species.”

HALO is an updated version of one of your earlier works from 1998. Do you think that something has changed in the message behind this work, or the need to communicate it? Would you say that the tools you have now allowed you to create a more compelling image?

It’s a sequel to CAMP which was a work which presented a rather idyllic and clichéd summer moment in Canada: heat rising from a campfire, distorting a full moon overhead with the sound of popcorn popping on the fire. In just a couple of decades, it feels like everything has changed. Campfires are now banned during the summer in British Columbia, where I now live, due to extended droughts and the threat of wildfires. Last year we experienced our 3rd worst wildfire season on record, all 3 of which occurred in the last 5 years. 1,610 fires burned 868,203 hectares across the province. Within months, the fires were followed by unprecedented flooding.

The color of the moon in HALO will be familiar to many living out here, as the smoke from these fires often creates vibrant, stunning pink, orange or red moons. The sun too reflects similar colors and can be stared at easily with the smoke offering a sufficient hazy filter. Summers now bring a mix of joy for its promised, remaining riches and genuine fear associated with what else they will bring. I now look out my windows towards a tree-covered mountain and think, “that’s a lot of fuel”.
https://embed.niio.com/1.1/index.html?showinfo=false&autoplay=true&mute=true&hidefullscreen=false&controls=true&artworkid=26154&portrait=false&key=MSDBK5B7WZ&invitationCode=j3nu1ygscves2h5

The image and sound quality of CAMP certainly reflects the time that the work was produced, along with the capabilities of consumer video cameras at the time. It was also one of my earliest moving image works where the moment seemed more important to capture than its fidelity. Now that I’m able to control images with a certain level of precision, I’m equipped to create works that are increasingly freed of the limitations of technological capabilities (and their associated impact). I can create with a more painterly lens, in a sense, which has clear benefits on the quality and overall construction of the image.

Your work draws inspiration from science fiction to portray potential futures. Which subjects do you expect to address in your work? Which potential futures would you like to explore?

The situation we’re in and the futures we now face result from all crises, really. They are all connected. One drives another, and so on. For us to evolve as a species in order to usher in a different future, we need to address the connections between all of these crises and what drives us towards them.

How would you describe your experience in the NFT space? Why did you choose to exhibit your work on alterHEN?

I originally entered the NFT space in opposition to the harmful emissions associated with the energy use of PoW. 30 artists, many of which are digital art pioneers, contributed to The FEN, a coordinated NFT drop on hic et nunc (the first NFT platform on PoS), initiated by Joanie Lemercier and curator Juliette Bibasse to encourage artists and collectors within the space to switch to using a significantly less harmful platform and blockchain which uses a tiny fraction of the energy of PoW. On PoS, minting an NFT requires energy use equivalent to a social media post such as a Tweet, for instance. Over the last year, I’ve maintained advocating for this harm reduction and will continue to for as long as I am part of this space.

Both founders of a\terHEN, Diane Drubay and Patrick Tresset were part of The FEN so we connected there. Additionally, at the time that a\terHEN was conceived, there was a frenzied pace of production within the space where artists were minting several times a week. Between the pace and the associated hype, it felt like the ability to slow down to appreciate the work itself was nonexistent. a\terHEN set out to offer a space to slow down consumption, to give work the time it often needs to be fully appreciated. This really appealed to me both from a production point of view (as I tend to labor over my work) and an experiential one. I want my work to have impact and for that, it requires my time and that of those that consider it.

“For decades, we’ve “understood” the world through screens which offer a complete disconnect from our relationship to the natural systems which sustain us”

Through a\terHEN and other platforms which focus on the artworks, such as TEIA and Versum, I’ve connected with an inspiring community of artists and collectors, many of whom are new to me. It has allowed me to expand on the reach of my work in a significant way, with new audiences, which is invaluable when I concern myself with affecting the consciousness of people (particularly, as previously mentioned, within a screen based space). Additionally, for the first time in 25+ years making moving image works, I have been able to acquire works from 250+ artists who I’ve admired for many years along with artists who I was previously unaware of. It’s groundbreaking in that sense and it’s a joy to be a part of.