Mathew Emmett
Curator speaks with the artist and architect about his research-based practice and recent exhibition at the Museo dell’Arte Classica in Rome.
Interview by Camilla Boemio
Mathew Emmett is a British architect and artist who disrupts the original use and perception of buildings. Emmett infects architectural spaces with an altered sense of reality by drawing upon intermedia disciplines spanning video, electronic sound, and digital performance. Addressing both destructive and redemptive themes in society today, his work reveals multilayered references to the continual study of the Isenheim Altarpiece. Emmett collaborates with Kraftwerk co-founder Eberhard Kranemann, Candoco Dance Company founder Adam Benjamin, Node electronics composer Dave Bessell, cyberspace architect Neil Spiller and architectural theorist Charles Jencks. In June 2016, at Tate Modern London, Emmett performed Sender/Receiver at the opening of the Blavatnik Building. In 2022, Emmett showed St. Sebastian: Plague Memory, an audio-visual installation, at The Contemplative Edge program at Museo dell’Arte, Polo Museale Sapienza in Roma. Emmett has a Doctorship in situated cognition and architecture, studied at the Architectural Association, Bartlett School of Architecture, Central St.Martins, and in 2007 studied space music under Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kürten.
Please describe your practice, combining art and architecture.
My practice utilizes art installation and audiovisual intervention to create immersive environments. By extending architectural settings beyond their utility, I can use these spaces as realms of communication. Essentially, I intervene within architectural spaces to create psychoactive environments. By re-framing architecture within a psychologically affective framework, an extended potential for semiological articulation is revealed.
Buildings can be re-framed as a form of communication—‘prepared’ in the same way that John Cage (Cage: Bacchanale, 1938/1940) temporarily altered a piano by placing bolts, screws, mutes, rubber erasers, etc., to change its sound. Altered buildings, in the same way, can receive performative interventions designed to re-code and transmit socio-cultural information. The functional demands of this form of architecture are more concerned with adapting and re-ordering the spatial context that produces a certain morphological dimension both in the psychical space and in the cognitive realm of the users, where the mediation of effect in space itself serves an articulatory function. Here, the spatialization of communication, using audiovisual techniques and performance in conjunction with altered architectural settings, became a work of architecture. Architecture remains a powerful tool of organization, but rather than utility, architecture becomes a setting within which to express ideas, and their volumetric and tectonic nature is altered to help guide the communicative frame.
The locusts came down out of the smoke, digital print on aluminum dibond
St. Sebastian (Gian Lorenzo Bernini) digitally reimagined, 2022, Museo dell’Arte Classica, Rome. Photo by Elisabetta Villa
The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Museo dell’Arte Classica, Rome 2022
St Sebastian: Plague Memory transformed the facade of the Museo dell’Arte Classica with explorations of community, regeneration, landscape, spirituality, protection, freedom, and flux. Can you provide an introduction to the project?
I developed St Sebastian: Plague Memory amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the project reflects upon pandemics and vulnerability, metabolizing our past with the present. It is an immersive, multi-channel installation: the architectural setting of the museum is transformed into a discomforting narrative of necrotic flesh-like forms and, through the projection of light, evokes the catacombs of Rome to reimagine earlier artist interpretations of the Martyrdom of St Sebastian. Existing museum sculptures act as three-dimensional screens revealing the pathological journey. Their forms are illuminated by piercing rays of red light representing the arrows piercing St Sebastian. A minimalist soundscape recalls the breath and pouring on of the ointment of St Sebastian.
St. Sebastian Plague Memory, 2022, Facade Projection, La Notte Dei Musei, Museo dell’Arte Classica. Photo by Elisabetta Villa
St. Sebastian: Plague Memory (detail), 2022, Museo dell’Arte Classica, Rome. Photo by Elisabetta Villa
Tell me about your study of composition and the importance of sound in your work.
I was fortunate enough to be accepted to the Karlheinz Stockhausen Composition and Interpretation Course in Kürten, Germany, for the analysis of compositional strategies of Licht-Bilder in 2007. I originally met Stockhausen while studying at the Architectural Association, and he invited me to attend his master's class to understand his spatialization theories better. During my time in Kürten, Stockhausen generously explained how his fascinating scores worked – transcribing live sound events into a coded, two-dimensional form.
Like an architect, Stockhausen recognized the importance of temporalities in three-dimensional space. Stockhausen’s compositions were parametrically organized in multiple temporal dimensions, which all stemmed from a ‘superformula’ (Stockhausen, 1989: 131). I was particularly interested in Stockhausen’s SPIRAL for a soloist (1968), which was performed live in Kürten. The piece was transformative for me, introducing the concept of an open system-to-system network that includes improvisation and structured elements. SPIRAL consists of a sequence of ‘moment-forming’ (Stockhausen, 1989: 60) events in which the soloist improvises with a short-wave receiver. While the soloist tunes the short-wave receiver, the soloist’s voice improvises with radio sounds with a combination of structured ‘responses’ and live improvisations. This created a reflexive event that became a major influence on my practice.
Since 2015, I have been working with the German sound artist Eberhard Kranemann, the co-founder of Kraftwerk. Eberhard collaborated with Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, and through our collaborations, we have been able to extend neo-Fluxus improvisation and performance techniques within my immersive practice. Our projects particularly use electronic sound distortion and feedback to create counter situations – providing the means of directing perception.
Charles Darwin (AV immersive performance) in collaboration with Eberhard Kranemann, 2018, The Atlantic Project. Photo by Dom Moore
What drew you to creating architectural, multi-media installations?
I began exploring the dynamics of spatial fields and affective experience while researching the German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys at Central St. Martins. Creating Avant-garde events and multi-media happenings interested me as immersive situations where different artistic genres blended to create an extended sense of reality as a “free-dimension.” (Harrison & Wood, 1999: 724)
The Fluxus movement opened up a new field of investigation for me, initiating a long-term inquiry into the complex interplay between architectural space, audience participation, and spatialized modes of affectivity (e.g., time, space, event, etcetera). I started to question how architectural space could both absorb and transmit narratives in response to inhabitation, but also how environments could exert their influence on the users. Later, I originated the term “psychoactive architecture” (Emmett, 2013) to challenge the physical boundaries of Cartesian dualism. By considering architecture as psychoactive, that is, stimulating a range of psychological, behavioral, and temporal responses, I situate architecture as an effector system within a performative framework that recognizes the co-evolution of communicative situations. The theoretical interpretation of cognitive science within an architectural discipline aims to make more explicit the fluid transition between physical architectural space and internalized cognitive disciplines, siting architecture at the interface of a communicatively charged environment.
Digitally Augmented Bullroarer performance at the opening of the Blavatnik Building, TATE Modern, 2016
We are experiencing an urgent climate crisis and resource challenges. Your project SHAME reflects your commitment to these issues. Please share a bit about the work.
SHAME addresses carbon literacy directly in the form of an AV protest. Performed live at the Oxo Tower Wharf (London in 2020), the work confronts us with the human impact on the natural landscape to reveal the continued toll human inflict has on the planet. As part of the apocalyptic narrative, SHAME presents a series of terminal landscapes to present a critical visual image of how economic relationships influence our invasive exploration of the world’s diminishing resources. The video shows oil fields, deforestation, genocide in the Amazon rainforest, toxic waste sites, and forests ravaged by fire and flooding. To accompany the video, I composed an unnerving soundscape to underline what faces us in the future. By foregrounding the climate crisis, we can bring climate and ecological destruction to the forefront of all our decisions.
By expanding design-thinking methods through ecological thinking that is transdisciplinary and integrative, we can learn how to transform people’s lives through interconnected systems that are more sustainable, responsive, and resilient.
Toxic, Audiovisual Installation & Performance, Oxo Tower Wharf, London, 2020
I’d love to hear any final thoughts on the role of transdisciplinary artists such as yourself.
I argue for greater levels of transdisciplinary practice because the more diverse the disciplines we assemble, the greater the potential for “resolving the conflict.” First, I think of transdisciplinary as transformative – relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something. Second, I think of transdisciplinary as a verb. People who work on transdisciplinary projects actively engage and realize thorough and complete reform. Here the action is essential Transdisciplinaries don’t sit on the sidelines. They actively engage.
Social Links
Camilla Boemio is an internationally published author, curator, and member of the AICA (International Arts Critics) based in Rome. In 2013, Boemio was the co-associate curator of PORTABLE NATION: Disappearance as work in Progress – Approaches to Ecological Romanticism, the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th International art exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In 2016, Boemio was the curator of Diminished Capacity, the First Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Boemio’s recent curatorial projects include her role as co-associate curator at Pera + Flora + Fauna. The Story of Indigenousness and The Ownership of History, an official collateral event at the 59th International art exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Invitations to speak include the Tate Liverpool, MUSE Science Museum, and the Cambridge Festival 2021, at Crassh, in the UK.