This year, Barnaby Steel (co-founder & creative director) of the Collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), will not only be part of the famous „Impulse giving“ opening speech at Creative Days Vienna 2024 edition but also conduct a 90-minute masterclass, taking so the audience on a journey through MLF’s work, where one project is woven into the next, and in the next and in the next. We talked about science, language, existence tissue, transformation, wonder, and mystery.
Erka Shalari: I’m delighted to welcome you here today. When scrolling through the Marshmallow Laser Feast’s works, it’s remarkable how many festivals and biennials have featured your work: Forward, re:publicca, Istanbul Design Biennial, Tribeca, Sundance, and many more. It seems that these events provide a natural landscape for showcasing your art. What makes festivals so special to you?
Barnaby Steel: I think festivals are a joy because you meet an audience face to face. And that process of conversation and cross-pollination expands how I think and moulds future ideas. Unlike the often solitary and digital process of creating art, which can involve months of computer work, festivals provide a refreshing contrast. Our projects usually begin with observation, working with flowers, trees, or various ecosystems to gather data. A lot of our work is very digital, so for me, I just love to come out of this ‚hibernation‘ and cross-pollinate, and the festivals are really crucial for that interaction and exchange.
You will be holding a Master Class at Biofabrique Vienna. Could you share some insights? What do you hope to bring to the attendees?
It’s slightly strange to think of myself as a ‚master‘ (smiles). As the years have gone on, my focus of attention is often connected through the lens of science to observing some kind of phenomena: plants, sometimes is the human body, so my learnings from that process are always font to share. Through the lens of science, you end up in some strange, peculiar places that reveal who we are and what we are. Seeing the world through that lens always adds a deeper sense of wonder and mystery. It never subtracts, and so in that sense, it is just really exciting to be able to share those insights with groups of people. In some ways, it also makes an alignment of spiritual realisation or a spiritual connection. Through that lens, extracting the essence of what’s being observed, and translating that into a multisensory experience that carries within it a connection to the mystery of where we come from. That’s the place where the most profound shift in perspective can maybe shape the way we see the world.
When you envision this space where perspective shifts happen, what do you think of?
All of our work involves a perspective shift away from the human-centred worldview to the realization that humans exist in relationship to the more-than-human world and that we are entirely entwined with the health of plants, rivers, and oceans. Thus, the idea of acting in self-interest has to be extended to the interest of other life forms. Is biodiversity to stay in life, and so one very beautiful perspective to shift is: if you think about a photon that leaves the sun to arrive at a tree (imagine it as a golden thread) and through that process of photosynthesis that is woven into the leaves and they flow as sugar through the tree into the foods, into the human body. Essentially, the golden threads of sunlight go from cosmic energy to biological energy and weave into the entire food web. The oxygen creates a little bit of water, and through cellular respiration, the energy of the sun is released. So, seeing that way, you realise that photosynthesis translates this cosmic energy into biological one, and is through them that we exist. That puts trees, in particular, in this ecosystem as the foundation of life. Viewing a tree as this breathing being that creates ingredients for us to – with the food we eat, through the air that we breathe, is a true perspective shift, it can shift the way one thinks about a tree.
Your works and research delve into expanded perception. How do you envision this enhanced understanding benefiting us? How could one expand one’s own perception? Or how have you managed to expand yours, like thinking of cosmic energy?
Well, the way the world appears through our senses, as beautiful as our senses are, as rich the experience of being a human, is just a tiny fraction of this broader spectrum that exists beyond the limit of our senses. And so, if you start to think about that scientific lens as a way of expanding perception to be able to observe beyond the limits of our eye. Then the stories come back from that observation and often feel quite alien to our senses. Even just down to the fact that you are made of trillions of other living beings: the bacteria in your throat, the cells working in harmony to make you you, you wouldn’t believe that and if you would see on microscope you would be „Oh wow what is going on in here, and keep going in“ and then they discover wild stories, and there is a deep mystery in all of that. I think in looking through that lens, you recognise that what you could experience is a tiny little slice. You are a nest in the ecosystem, as the throat bacteria are to you.
So, you start to think about reality or life as not having a centred perspective that you occupy. You start to explore that as a spectrum, and you start to think of what the world would look like from the eyes of different organisms.
I think the more you expand into that kind of tissue of existence, the more you start to see yourself as woven into a relationship with everything else. This is a beautiful way to wake up and see the world, and it just adds to the feeling of being home and connected. Maybe you could argue that a scientific worldview can objectify the world, also through nature reductionism, you break the world into its parts to understand how it works, and every part needs to be named; so you start to build up a world made of objects, defined by the words that you can name and all of that language is scattered in, that allows you to describe the world, but is missing the more profound truth that the only things that exist is relationships.
You don’t get trees without pollinators, just like you don’t get people without planets. Like we see planets as apples grow on a tree. Maybe, the dominant narratives that shape our worldview are grounded in language, so it is interesting to think about the limits of language and the works we are exploring is about exploring phenomena and sensations, and it doesn’t allow the language to get to an understanding, you can lean in into the experience.
Let’s remain at language. I also wanted to say that I really like words used in your collective works: Where Do I End And Begin When Sunlight Is Under My Skin; making the invisible visible; Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest. How are, for instance, called the works that you are showing this time in Vienna? How do names emerge?
We are not going to showcase one of our work as per se in Vienna, as I will be joining the Creative Days delivering a masterclass, but you can expect an exploration into the interconnectedness of all living beings. There is a wonderful book called Existence by David Hinton in which he explores this idea as existence tissue, so there is no separation between things. There is just one tissue of existence.
I will be taking the audience on this journey through our work, which frames it much more like existence tissue, where one project is woven into the next, and in the next and in the next.
But together, they form a bigger story, and we are just at the seeding phase of that exploration, and the ambition is as I sort of galavanted toward old age so the possibilities of this artwork expanding into much more extensive ecosystems, who can become viewed by a lot of people, that that might be realities in the future. At the moment, it’s contained within the limits of the technology. I guess, in some ways, the work is at the birth of a new medium, and it is difficult to reach large audience numbers, but in the long term, we have the ambition to do that.
There is a little point that came to my head that might be relevant – it is about the limitation of language, so if I ask you what an apple tastes like, then the scaffolding of language doesn’t reach the sensation, it falls so short of the actual sensation, so you can apply that logic to this idea of creating immersive experiences where you are engaging multiple senses in an experience. The experience people have (the experiences even create the people) using virtual reality and haptics, you can start to explore the main sensations in ways that go way beyond traditional forms like cinema. I think that spaces expand as technology expands.
Through that lens, the work is just gonna become more immersive and more powerful as a form of storytelling. Storytelling after experiencing it. The experience doesn’t rely on language. Regarding the titles of our works – throughout the process of making a work, we often involve conversations with scientists, and more recently, we have been collaborating with a poet called Daisy Lafarge, and she is wonderful at weaving complex scientific ideas into text, using metaphors to capture their essence. Often the titles of our projects are sometimes things Daisy is coming up; so for example „Where Do I End And Begin When Sunlight Is Under My Skin“, is something that she came up with for the project Evolver. Then, other times, as projects evolve, we are just playing with ideas constantly, ping-pong-ing ideas around, and sometimes something just comes up.
MLF loves liminal spaces. What potential do these spaces hold, and what other environments do you imagine for showcasing your work?
Often, an artwork starts with a simple intention. For example, the piece Evolver begins with this idea – what would it be like to breathe myself into my own body and go on that journey of breath? That idea doesn’t stop with the inbreath; it starts with the outbreath of the tree so that it flows out of the tree into the human.
And so, a simple idea like this, then unfolds into a deep dive into the science of anatomy, and collaborations with different institutions that are looking to the human body through different lenses such as electromicroscopes, CT scanners, fMRI scanners, and you would also find that different institutions have varied different focuses.
So for example the Fraunhofer MEVIS research institute in Germany has a very special lens for looking at blood flow through the heart, and the Allen Institute for Cell Science in America has been looking at cells through electron microscopes and are able to offer volumetric modules of stems cells and other kind of human cells, that are available online. So, I am kind of reaching out to build up a collage of datasets that we can then build in the virtual world.
We built this giant virtual world, and the experience can be glimpsed through screens, which are like windows into the world. In virtual reality, you step through the window, and you will be able to spatially explore the world, a little bit like going for a walk in a forest. In Evolver, you can wander through the ecosystem of our body, witnessing breath as it moves through the body. The process of generating that data is very exciting.
We did a series of experiments and prints. Prints that were portraits of breath into the body, looking at the hand and the head, the lungs. So, a very simple idea can be expressed in lots of different forms, and so that’s part of the joy of being an artist is to learn in different types of forms of expression and how each form carries with it its own wave representing an idea. For example, a printed image is something you can reflect on for a long time, and it can resonate in a completely different way than if you are in a virtual reality experience, where you are moving on a journey and everything is changing. So, in that sense, we are kind of making the artwork, and then we are figuring out how to display it, often at a festival or in galleries, and more recently, we started producing and distributing limited editions of artworks.
Is your studio still in East London? Can you tell us some highlights of the neighbourhood?
When we started Marshmallow Laser Feast, we intended to self-invest in passion projects and collaborate with other artists, architects, and designers. Collaborations allow us to learn and grow. Hackney Wick, with its strong network of creatives and freelancers, has been a great place for this. We all share projects. If someone is too busy to do a project, they would just offer up to a friend and it started to create nice bonds between artists and designers. I think Hackney Wick has always been a great place for that, as it has a strong network of creatives and individuals passionate about what they do and create. If your artistic practice is bound by the skills and craft of in-house people, then you are kind of, you can become trapped within the limits of your ability. But when you start of the idea of defining the team, then you are freed by the constraints of your own abilities to make something, and suddenly it opens up to the possibilities of collaborating with experts, to realise ideas on a scale that goes way beyond your own technical skills, so I think in that sense Hackney Wick has been a good launch place for that kind of work. Now our kind of network has spread also all over the world. We have been working remotely with scientists and philosophers and 3D animators.
What are you looking forward to during your days in Vienna?
I’m mainly excited to listen to other talks, meet people, and cross-pollinate ideas. I like to talk about future projects. Ideas are moulded through conversations. In my experience, it is through conversations and a diverse range of people that you can maybe find the essence of an idea. I’m also looking forward to spending time with the hosts, who are long-time friends and great people putting up this festival. I always enjoy coming to Vienna and hanging out with the ‚gang‘ (smiles).
Barnaby Steel, speaking at the opening of Creative Days Vienna: June 5th, at 18:30
Marshmallow Laser Feast – Experience Design Masterclass: More information
Full Programme: www.wirtschaftsagentur.at/creative-days-vienna
The Creative Days Vienna are part of the startup festival ViennaUP’24 initiated by the Vienna Business Agency and mark the prelude to Content Vienna, a competition for digital design.
