Hypersea

The successful applicant of our open call residency is visual artist, musician, writer and cultural theorist Hypersea.

The open call was for a music commission to create new work in response to the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery.  The exhibition is the culmination of a three year project consisting of a series of exhibitions across the North West of England featuring new work and commissions by visual artists Shezad Dawood, Jessica El Mal, Parham Ghalamdar and RA Walden that address the urgent thematic focus of climate change. Hybrid Futures is a partnership between Castlefield Gallery Manchester; Grundy Art Gallery Blackpool; Touchstones Rochdale; University of Salford Art Collection; and Shezad Dawood Studio, exploring collective and more sustainable ways of working that will influence how the partnership commissions, exhibits and collects new work by visual artists to benefit and be more relevant to their audiences, now and in the future.  

For this project, post-disciplinary practitioner Hypersea will develop a performance starting with ideas surrounding fluidity, interconnectivity and notions of collectivity as inspired by Shezad Dawood’s work Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea. The work, which will evolve over the 10 day residency, will incorporate instruments built in Max/MSP, data sonification and visualisation, and explorations into motion-controlled A/V, moving towards a final work in which the movements of audience members in the space will contribute to the overall soundscape of the installation.

The name Hypersea is taken from a theory referenced in Astrida Neimanis’ hydrofeminist thesis Bodies of Water. The theory stems from Mark & Dianna McMenamin’s Hypersea: Life on Land theory which posits that all life on land began in the ocean and challenges notions of biological and evolutionary hierarchy. With the emergence of technologies such as Generative A.I and Quantum computing, it is important to cultivate positive relationships between human and machine, interrogating how the two can work in tandem with a view to building a better, fairer and healthier world.

The work produced towards the end of the Hybrid Futures residency will be an immersive sonic and visual experience, where the physical bodies of audience members paired with processes developed using machine learning techniques will collectively form the final outcome. These ideas are intended to present provocations around modes of collectivity, beneficial human-machine interaction and how new technology can be used in exciting and innovative ways