Much of your work incorporates digital technology. Could you share a memory of an early encounter with digital art? 
I remember hitting the RUN RETURN combo on a C64 second hand Commodore computer that I inherited from my cousin. That was my first encounter with a digital landscape where you could create and control movement on a screen via gaming.

But then as artists, my partner Flo and I were never that interested in the segregation between digital and analog stuff. If anything, we acknowledged that there was an emergence of digital elements in our creative processes. At The Royal College of Art there were tutors from the early cohorts of digital artists. They experimented with computer vision and stuff like that. But we were always more interested in the physical side of it, the digital stuff that's embedded in our haptic reality. Our reality is full of actual matter, so there needs to be a physical component to the things we encounter, to engage with them properly. Art needs to have some physical aspect.


These physical aspects invite sensory interaction, which is a critical element of your work today. What inspires you to integrate the audience and what does the audience bring to your installations?
The audience brings everything. In ‘When Tomorrow Comes’ the audience inserts itself, or a very abstracted version of itself into an algorithm. The piece becomes complete through audience participation. It's not only something we offer ready for consumption, but it is what you, as part of the audience, make of it.

How do the possibilities and atmosphere of The Ritual Space inform the installation and audience experience?
Humans have always congregated around forms of belief, narratives or stories. The Ritual Space has these ritualistic qualities, like a temple, so it raises questions about the role of art in all of this. Does art help create spaces where people can take a rest and contemplate? Can exhibition spaces take on this spiritual role, or become some kind of neuroscientific, spiritual replacement of more traditional gathering places? It definitely invites shared experiences of art. In some way, art can help prepare us for what’s to come.


Where does your appreciation for collective experiences and participatory art come from?
I think the appreciation comes from insatiable curiosity. When it comes to art, for me, and I think also for my partner Flo, leading a monologue becomes really boring really quickly. Whereas dialog and collaboration, even after 20 years, continue to be full of surprises. It's brutal sometimes, but it’s an energizing editing process, it's ongoing, and it doesn't get boring.


Are there any challenges to this — to working collaboratively? 
You just have to kill your ego. But it's healthy. For example, we are the founders and so on and so forth, but if anybody in the studio comes up with a better idea you will support that. You need to take yourself back all the time and reign in your narcissism. It's really good, but it's also hard sometimes, you know, it's really hard because there is an attachment of some degree to your own intimate, personal creativity.

‘When Tomorrow Comes’ explores human and emotional responses to the encounter with Artificial Intelligence. What inspired this theme?
We've been exploring and experimenting with collective behavior, and the expression of collective behavior through movement in particular, in the form of swarming flocking algorithms, since 2006. It started out as a very playful fascination with the beauty of flocking and swarming. For example, how can you have half a million birds flocking around and not see them crashing once? And then we looked into how to simulate that. Can we sort of wrestle that back from nature and make it our human own? And, you know, try to play with it? We eventually found an amazing researcher called Craig Reynolds in the US who developed digital simulations of these flocking algorithms. They're based on very simple rules, but when you throw them together and they start to interact they create these incredible flocking movements that seem to show signs of emerging life forms.

In ‘Life in our Minds’, one of our latest bodies of work, which includes algorithmic, screen-based iterations, we consider what seeing [movement] does to us. We’re looking at the human need of assigning some form of sentience to movement. It might be just a puddle, but if it moves in a certain way, we love to think it's alive.


How do these themes connect to the bigger picture of technology in our lives? 
In a time where we can be fooled into thinking that pretty much anything is life-like and therefore like us — in a time where you embed AI into robotics, where this stuff becomes physical, this [need of assigning sentience] makes us very vulnerable as a species, because we connect and have emotional engagement with things that we think are like us.

With ‘When Tomorrow Comes’, we try to push those boundaries, to make it weirder, to make it a bit more alien, to explore “How weird does something need to become for us to question it and lose our connection to it? I don't think we're anywhere near the answers, but I think we're here to open up this dialog. We're not scientists or social scientists, but we want to put it out there and, you know, explore that creatively and artistically, without making any sort of value statements.


So art as a means for asking questions?
Yes, I think there's enough commentary. So art to explore and ask questions. But also art as an unconditional space to explore the world and the future. ■