Keith Armstrong, Heaton, Newcastle.
Keith Armstrong is an experimental artist profoundly motivated by issues of social and ecological justice. His engaged, participative practices provoke audiences to comprehend, envisage and imagine collective pathways towards sustainable futures. He has specialised for over twenty-three years in collaborative, experimental practices with emphasis upon innovative performance forms, site-specific electronic arts, networked interactive installations, alternative interfaces, art-science collaborations and socially and ecologically engaged practices.
Keith’s research asks how insights drawn from scientific and philosophical ecologies can help us to better invent and direct experimental art forms, in the understanding that art practitioners are powerful change agents, provocateurs and social catalysts. Through inventing radical research methodologies and processes he has led and created over sixty major art works and process-based projects, which have been shown extensively in Australia and overseas, supported by numerous grants from the public and private sectors.
In late 2019 he showed his new work Elegy for Life, Anthem for Artifice in The 5th International Art and Science Exhibition and Symposium: The Integration of Art and Science in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at the National Museum of China, and in 2022 he was the installation artist for the large-scale collaborative artwork Uramat Mugas showcased for the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10) at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane.
A full history of his work can be viewed at www.embodiedmedia.com.
Work at the collection: "Common Thread" 2022
"Common Thread" 2022
Common Thread is an audiovisual work installation presented in the peer-reviewed, curated exhibition ‘Possibles’ as part of ISEA 2022 (27th International Symposium of Electronic Art). The artwork presents slow, mysterious passages through thickly forested landscapes, comprised solely of silver-grey dots and lines; whilst affected sounds of those forests commingle with the distant voices of myriad species. Set within those uncanny landscapes, indistinct 3D forms enigmatically appear and disappear, collectively evoking richly mysterious, unknowable and extraordinary complexities.
