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Seven interviews the United Visual Artists

Written by Alan Perkins
Tuesday, 07 April 2009 00:00

Based in Borough, South London, the United Visual Artists (UVA) is a collective of artists, designers, engineers and architects who combine efforts on artistic and commercial design pieces. Their V&A installation Volume was an interactive light display which allowed the viewer to create sculptures of light and sound. The columns of light responded to the movement of the viewer, triggering individual displays of colour and sound. Their installation Echo mixed a light display with performance art and was held in the Tate Modern’s gigantic Turbine Hall. Other creations have been displayed in Tokyo, Istanbul and Taiwan.

The collective have also provided the stage lighting for tours by Massive Attack, UNKLE, the Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx, and worked on videos for the Arctic Monkeys and Battles. Their most recent piece Chorus was a collaboration with Opera North and Warp Records’ artist Mira Calix. Chorus involved eight swinging pendulums of light and a reactive sound recording from Calix. It ran at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds.



AP: How do you think Chorus went? How do you feel it was received?

UVA: Chorus was an interesting case as we had an open brief. We had quite a big chance to create an art piece without anybody dictating what we did. We had some restrictions, but most didn’t matter as we proceeded from the initial proposal pretty much as we wanted.

 From our point of view, it was very successful, satisfying and true to initial concept. With some commercial work, it can sometimes get designed by a committee. We were very lucky Opera North had seen some of our other work, liked it and trusted us enough to come up with something. Because it was an experimental work, there was quite a lot of trust and, until we got the first prototype, they had no idea how it was going to feel in the space. The people had an average stay of 35 minutes in the instillation which made us very happy.

AP: UVA mixes a lot of commercial work with a lot of purely artistic work. Do you think a line can ever be drawn between the two?

UVA: I have a pretty simple definition of that as design work is the one that makes the money and the art is the one that loses the money (laughs). We balance out the art and design work; often, there is design work that is fascinating and pays for the art work so in that sense, there is no cut and dry definition. The joy of working at UVA is that you can cross both boundaries. A lot of the work we did for Massive Attack was at that interesting area where art meets design and we had the chance to work on both those fields at the same time. The whole point of UVA is to mix art design, architecture and sculpture and all the space between these disciplines.

AP: How did Mira Calix come to be involved?

UVA: There were ourselves and another company competing for this piece and Mira was in the jury. She really enjoyed our concept and wanted to get involved from the start. We looked into other artists, but decided to go with her as she was really keen from the start. We spoke to quite a few sound designers. We do a lot of work with Warp Records and she has also collaborated with designers we work with, but what attracted us to her work is the modern take on a classical brief and the fact she is familiar with working on a very technical system. This was a very bizarre system to work on as tempo and pitch were not fixed; it was very complex. She had worked with Opera North and knew how to mix between our disciplines and Opera North’s discipline.

AP: What role does new media and new technology have in the development of art?

UVA: I think, in a lot of cases, art and technology should be separate, but at UVA we try to mix the two. Art can be valid if it doesn’t explore new areas; a watercolour painting is still a beautiful thing no matter if it is not using new technology, but at UVA we take a lot of new technology not because of its newness but simply because it is unfamiliar. Because they haven’t been around very long, people have not experimented with them. This allows us to try unfamiliar things with them. The use of technology is not an end in itself, but a means of creating a specific mood or piece of imagination.

It is also a way of exploring past things in a new way. First there was painting, studies of people, then photos and portraits. This brings the next element. Lots of what we have done builds on old concepts – Calder and Miro for example – and we are still studying the form and past discipline and looking at new things through new eyes; looking for the slightly obscure, untouched angle.

A lot of the time, we use quite up-to-date technology, but what we create is conceptually a very pure and simple idea. Chorus’s concept was not the sound system and PCM controlled digital light, but a series of eight pendulums swinging with a light that corresponds to the music. How we do it is irrelevant in a way. Technology was the tool to create the object which we compose. We generate atmosphere. There are many ways we can approach it and we know what to achieve in terms of atmosphere and work back. Chorus hit the nail on the head when people spent a lot of time just walking. It was quite a meditative process to watch. People just sat down and didn’t say anything and just explored the space we made. But we would have tried to do it with just a pencil and brush and moisture in the air.

AP: How much would you describe your projects as collaborations?

UVA: It is very rare any UVA project is the output of one individual; it is very much a group effort and the fact we all come from different backgrounds means we have different takes. Chorus, for example, had a team of seven or eight. The nature of these things is that the concept can come from anywhere and is modulated, but then people talk about it and it tends to get thrown around the studio. Often there will be an idea, like the pendulum where everyone agrees it is the right idea. The most important thing is the feeling and, through our different backgrounds, we were all able to mix with the process. It is weird, with how many people are at UVA now, that there is a clear line that runs through. We all have different opinions, but there is never a point where we argue. Everyone has a clear idea of the UVA aesthetic. Every project that comes up has to conform to the UVA worldview and, although we use quite disparate mediums - pendulums, neon, L.E.D. - there is a similar mood to the work and there is always some relation.

AP: Can you give me an example of a linking mood?

UVA: Now you’re asking me to give away secrets! (laughs) One of the things that links them is creating a feeling. They are not conceptual art in the sense of trying to convey a specific message about a specific thing, but more about the things you can’t put into words. Human interactions and relationships are important. We started off doing stage shows where there was this one-way transmission of a message. Then in the first Massive Attack show we did, there was a two-way thing where you could send a text message towards the screen and there was a relationship and the audience could affect the piece of work in some way. Volume was interesting as you could collaborate with each other to make the installation what you wanted and use it to generate sound and light. It would work by yourself, as one person could activate it, but if you worked with someone else, you could create lots of new pieces. Lots of the work we do is based on how it reacts to other people and the relationships between them. We judge the success of the work on how one person wandering in can respond to it. If it holds their attention and excites them to explore it further, that is a successful work. We judge the success of the work by how much people share and interact with it. One of the most interesting was Contact. No matter what age or gender, people’s desire to explore the place was really satisfying. It was almost too attractive as we had the problem of 18 or so little kids rushing around it. It is made of glass and metal, and we had to go and calm them down a little bit.

AP: What are the plans for the future?

UVA: We are exploring new concepts: interaction and relationships. We want to do things on different scales and look at more permanent works which is what we find very interesting as most of what we do is there for a day or a week. We are interested in if we can carry it on. We’ve got one or two coming, a mix of architecture, design work, some more pure art projects and music videos.

www.uva.co.uk

Thanks to James Medcraft, Dave Ferner and Alexapros Tsoliakis.