Users are invited to pick up a paint bucket, and place it in the Filling Station. There, they can take their photo and see it flow in to the bucket. Once that is done, they can throw their painted face all over the wall..

Paint drips and flows across the wall, revealing the many faces of previous players.

Phones can also be used to throw paint – either by blowing, flicking or swiping on the screen. It was first shown at Nokia World, London 2010.

The installation is also featured in the TV advert for the N8. See below for more media..

(See also The Source, Wave, Bloom and Railings)

On Tuesday, 27th July, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth unveiled greyworld’s latest installation at the new London Stock Exchange, in the heart of the city of London.

The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television.

Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the centre of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium.

This complex and sophisticated installation is a microcosm of activity, a living reflection of market forces.

BBC Radio Front Row [Audio]

The work of art occupies the full height of the building’s central 10-storey atrium. It uses hundreds of flowers, hidden within a seemingly sober column suspended within the space, to allow the building to bloom into life. A vibrant core at the centre of these buildings that reflects the dynamic activity within the surrounding offices.

The installation responds to the motion of people as they enter the atrium or travel up in the glass lift that dominates this space. In this way, people moving around the building can directly influence their environment. The installation is also affected by different light levels in the space, so as the sun shines the flowers gently bloom, opening their petals up to the sunlight. At quieter periods throughout the day the sculpture generates patterns based on an infinite library of forms, ensuring that the work of art is an elegant ever-changing heart at the centre of the building.

A small maquette of the artwork was installed at the headquarters of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, in Kensington, London.

Visitors to the installation space are requested to think of a word. Any word at all. They are handed a white cube, which they hold. As they speak their word in to the box, the box begins to glow with a gentle blue light.

They are then invited to explore what appears to be a large empty space, delineated by a red line around its edges. As they wander off in to this area they realise that in fact, invisible to the eye, there is a rich sonic environment to explore, full of words that are nestling amongst trees, flitting around pools of water, or hiding out in caves.

Some of these words live here permanently, and some have been dropped by people walking through the space. If the visitor wants to do this, they simply tip over their box, the light drains away, and their word falls out, living in that area for several hours, for others to discover.. When they are done, they return the box, to be filled by another word.

We wanted to explore, with these two installations, the elements that make us unique: our appearance/physical identity and our interaction with the world around us. In each case what may appear to be incorruptible and constant in the real world, such as our unique appearance, can be distorted and manipulated in the virtual world.

Heads (2005)

At first glance the installation appear to be a mirror of the real world of the gallery space. However, this mirror image of our world is transposed onto a virtual plane where the rules of ownership no longer apply. Suddenly one person’s head is transplanted onto another person’s body, creating a hybrid being whose identity is compromised: with one person controlling the body whilst another controls the mind. In this virtual world the laws of physics no longer applies and the basic tenets that make us human are corrupted.

Swarm (2005)

The installation explores the idea that our virtual identity is constantly under threat of attack by a swarm of ‘bugs’ trying to feed off the fabric of our virtual being. Again the installation is a hyper-painting a mirror that reflects the world of the gallery by transposes it onto a virtual plane, teaming with swarms of parasites. If the viewers are oblivious to their relationship with the world around them, a metaphor for their unguarded virtual identity, then the swarm of bugs will devour them. However, if they are aware of the threat then they are able to move, an arm or a foot for example and influence their environment – swatting away the threat of the insatiable swarm and protecting their identity. Only when we are aware of the threat to our digital identity can we take precautions to protect ourselves.

The exhibition, sponsored by McAfee, ran at the Science Museum in London from November 2005 – January 2006. It then began its tour of Europe, moving onto the USA in late 2006 and running into early 2007.

Tune is a sound work that treats the FACT building in Liverpool as the canvas for a single sonic composition. The work interrogates two layers of the building: its physical structure and the social architecture of the space

The installation is based on a unique sonic signature for the building, a 71-minute master palette of sound. Further derivations of this palette, each one a modification of the original pitch and scale are embedded in fixed assets and elements (for example lift buttons, doors, cash registers, security card readers etc.) around the building. It is hoped that this palette will also inform other sound producing devices (computer themes, phone systems, radio adverts). These fixed elements become nodes through which the composition can be accessed.

As these elements are stimulated, a ‘window’ is opened at random points on this composition. The size of this ‘window’ is determined by the element to which it is assigned. Frequently used elements are provided with a narrow gate allowing only brief fragments of the musical composition to emerge. Other fixtures may provide a longer glimpse at the embedded sound.

The palette variation assigned to each element derives from its position within the horizontal and vertical planes of the building. Visitors are taken on a gentle, almost subliminal, journey through the composition. Their experience is determined by a number of elements: the route they choose to take through the space, the volume of activity surrounding them and the time of day they make their journey.

For many the composition will remain a subtle sound work. The main objective is to create a signature, a sonic ‘feeling’ for the building, an identity often felt unconsciously by its inhabitants. Much of our conceptual framework for the installation will be irrelevant to those who participate in its performance. Some may actively seek out elements of the composition whilst for others it will be a wholly subconscious experience yet one ultimately providing a profound recognition of place.

Edit two [Audio]
Edit two [Audio]

They had Freggo, a luxury ice cream brand, willing to get involved. And we were excited by the prospect of creating a generative engine to respond visually to how things tasted.
We set about creating a system that took data from someone who had tasted one of twelve flavours of icecream. They then told the system how it tasted, based on six different criterior: Juiciness, Intensity, Richness, Sweetness, Creaminess, and Afterglow.

This data was directly linked to a generative engine that had been constructed to represent this information. We had constructed “visual universes” that flowed and blossomed as the new data arrived. Whilst we are not known for visual work, in galleries, it was a fabulous opportunity for greyworld to hone the generative engines that underpin many of our installations.

Exhibited in the Menier Chocolate factory in London, the work was also displayed on digital signage sites around London. Whilst an unusual project for us, we really enjoyed the opportunity to hone our generative art, and create variations on the art systems that we often employ in our installations.

Below are videos, each with three or four flavours. As the videos play, user data is changing, causing the visual sculptures to evolve and blossom.

These Taste experiments won 4 Gold and 1 Silver Awards at the DMA’s, London 2011.

The first game, Video Jigsaw, used a hidden camera and a plasma screen to create a jigsaw puzzle of the contestants face, which was broken into a series of squares. The contestant had to look at their image in the plasma and try to reassemble their face. However, the camera continued to take a live feed of their face as they tried to piece it back together, only heightening their frustration and tension.

The second game, Stealth floor, was chosen by the producers to be the final game on each programme, which would decide the outcome of this ruthless competition. The final two contestants were asked to walk across a sensitive surface that would buzz when too much pressure was applied to the colourful tiles. When the buzzer was activated the contestant had to return to the beginning of the floor to start again. It was an agonising race to the finishing button each week, with whoever touching the button first winning all the prize money.

Lots of fun.

Greyworld were invited to create a work for the conference. Lifts (6) was placed in the lifts of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre and offered the user of these lifts something different. Each lift had silver panels added to the walls, each panel containing a wide variety of switches, pulleys, rotating dials, knobs and buttons begging the traveller to press pull twist and turn these buttons. Each interaction was rewarded with a lift-filling soundscape which quickly became the talking point of the Conference.

A hidden camera records the space and its inhabitants the mirror like screen becoming the visual palette for an altered version of the captured reality. The volume of people, their movements and their spatial relationships generate the ‘treatment’ of the final piece. Watch yourself literally melt into the crowd, before bursting into fire and cruising down the street aflame.

Elements of the composition, which are static, can be treated very differently from those that move; moving people can become swarms of flies, with no solidity, whilst fixed or static elements remain solid even when behind a moving crowd.

As the installation moves through its programmed visual experiments, blue plasma streams through talking lips and trails gesticulating hands, people are reduced to ASCII text where cigarette smoke is transformed into strings of text and people appear to burst into flame.

Urban Sketches has been permanently installed in the SONY flagship store in New York (2001) and in the 360 Degree Gallery in London’s award-winning Sketch bar and restaurant (2003).