Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Tim Shaw
2023-2024
Home institution
Newcastle University, UK
Country of origin (home institution)
United Kingdom
Discipline(s)
Arts and arts studies; Others
Theme(s)
Visual Arts
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Artist and researcher Tim Shaw (born 1987) works with sound, light, and communication media to create performances, installations, and site-responsive interventions. His practice spans environmental sound art, digital media, media archaeology, walking, and installation making. Collaboration is central to his approach and he has engaged in interdisciplinary partnerships with medieval musicologists, data scientists, anthropologists, geologists, architects and astrophysicists.
Previously, Tim has developed artistic mechanisms to listen into the sound-worlds of insects, created augmented soundwalks, designed performances for high voltage devices, broadcast radio through trees, listened to network latency through time stretched bells, and extracted musical material from rocks. He frequently presents his work at festivals, in forests, caves, warehouses, up mountains, and in museums and art galleries all over the world.
In 2018, Tim completed his PhD at Newcastle University, United Kingdom, where he now works as a lecturer in digital media. In 2019, he was selected for SHAPE (Sound and Heterogeneous Arts Platform Europe) and is the co-founder of the Walking Festival of Sound.
Research Project
Structural Media: Artistic Approaches to Failure and Liveness in Art and Technology
Integrating his research interests in communication media, environmental sound, performance, and site-responsive art practices, Tim Shaw’s project at the Collegium Helveticum will develop new artistic systems that directly respond to the infrastructures and systems surrounding them.
Throughout the fellowship, he will explore the concept of “structural media,” an approach to media art that embraces the aesthetics of failure in live systems and promotes a heightened perception of the mechanisms of our shared technological infrastructures. This may include, for example, working with networks in order to reveal the material and temporal nature of the communication technologies that pervade everyday life.
Tim’s approach to art and technology values process over production, more specifically, a process which includes developing open mechanisms and generative systems for the creation of art. He will develop strategies for how these artistic interventions can facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary exchange.
As a senior fellow at the Collegium, Tim will generate new artworks exploring these themes and present them through an ongoing series of interventions.
Research Interests:
new artistic systems; infrastructures and systems; structural media