Eric R. Souther
Eric Souther (b. 1987, Kansas City) is an experimental artist and filmmaker exploring the intersections of technology, anthropology, and ritual through interactive installations, audiovisual performances, and custom software. His work has been shown in museums and festivals worldwide, including the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Athens Digital Arts Festival (Greece), and Festival ECRÃ (Brazil). He is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Western Michigan University.
EB: For those who are just discovering your work, how would you describe your artistic practice?
I am an experimental media artist who also develops my own video processing instruments in software to create new ways of seeing. These instruments are in real time, which allow me to work performatively and respond to new phenomena that arise from experimentation. It is important to me that these processes reinforce or work in unison with the conceptual frameworks of each piece.
EB: What drew you initially to the intersection of moving image, software, and performance?
I am inspired by the early video instruments of the 1970s. As a response to limited access to certain technologies and their ties to television production, artists and engineers of that period had to invent new tools and processes for image-making. For example, one of the first video instruments was a colorizer that allowed artists to remap the gray values of a black-and-white signal to have color. These histories are important because they highlight the need for artist-created tools and the impact they have on possibilities of image-making that are not led by industry.
At what point does a process become an instrument versus an effect? An effect is repeatable and fairly limited in its range of possibilities. An instrument should be flexible enough to be performative and to find new phenomena based on a wider range of parameters. I still resonate with the subcategory of video art practices called signal processing, which is the processing of moving images. I would place pioneers like Woody and Steina Vasulka, Gary Hill, and Nam June Paik in this category. For my work, signal processing is a reflexive exploration that generates new images in dialogue with video instruments.
EB: Your film No Time of Deep Time is a stunning exploration of geological timescales through digital manipulation. What inspired you to use Pictured Rocks as the central landscape for this work?
No Time of Deep Time is the third in a series of works that explore geological timescales. All three works use specific sites that have natural geological features exposing strata and layers of time. I chose Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore because the landscape was deposited between 1 billion and 500 million years ago. On a personal note, I had just moved to Michigan and needed to explore my new home.
EB: You mention using custom software to translate audio waves into complex patterns. Could you describe the process of building and performing with these tools?
I use a node-based programming environment called TouchDesigner. One of the things I love about it is that it can change one data type into another in one step, meaning sound to video, video to sound, sound to 3D geometry. At that point, everything becomes a signal. I love using oscillators to control everything, a fascination that stems from using control voltage in analog synthesis. It all becomes about signal flow and generating images via oscillation.
For example, when an oscillator becomes video, it creates black-and-white bars that move left or right based on the frequency. I often play with these patterns in the piece as a mask, by having a video in the white and another in the black. This gets more complicated when you map the result onto 3D geometry as both texture/image and height displacement. The piece becomes many layers of these experiments between audio waves that reveal or hide many different camera sources from multiple perspectives, including drone, GoPro in the water, and tripod footage. I wanted ways to weave perspective as a metaphor for weaving time and building images that feel like strata in themselves.
EB: The film explores imperceptible processes like erosion, sedimentation, and metamorphosis. How do you approach translating something so slow and vast into an experiential audiovisual form?
I spent a few years reading geology books, and one thing I became fascinated with was the language they use to describe things in structural geology, like folds. The drawings, to me, looked like oscillation patterns. It became clear that the Earth on a non-human scale is oscillating. My work seeks to bring geological scales across deep time into the human scale. The process I use with the images, I like to think, tunes into similar frequencies at work in creating the rock formations captured in the footage.
EB: Do you consider your technological systems to be collaborators in the creative process, or more like instruments for executing specific ideas?
I find it to be more collaborative in the sense that I’m most excited when I am surprised by the outcome. I create systems that are performative and flexible enough that I can explore them by asking questions — what happens when I do X, Y, or Z — and then run that through the process again. It truly is an investigation into possibilities, a dialogue with the system, a reason to put “experiment” in experimental.
EB: How do you see the role of ritual and anthropology in shaping your audiovisual language?
In the past, ritual was a way for me to humanize technology and explore performatively the effects it has on our worldview. To gain a greater understanding, I would look at rites and rituals across many cultures to peer into different ways of thinking about the human experience — a lens that is still useful for me today.
EB: Your work spans installations, performances, and single-channel video. What determines the format you choose for a specific project?
I usually let the work decide what it needs to be. By putting energy into something and seeing where it leads, it eventually gains momentum, and then I can follow.
EB: How do you define experimentation in the context of your creative process?
The systems I create start to develop a visual vocabulary through experimentation. I am very curious and like to tinker, to investigate the possibilities of systems. I’ll nudge parameters this way and that and see what’s there. Experimentation, at its core, is curiosity. If one can listen or see closely, it becomes intuitive. You can start to find images that go past the default and become something new.
EB: In what ways do you believe artists can challenge or expand our perception of time through moving image?
I like to think of moving images and time as a material. It can be sculpted, smeared, and engulf the senses. The malleability of this material is the artist’s medium to shift the normal flow of how time is experienced.
EB: What are some non-cinematic influences that have been essential to your artistic development?
As an artist, I love that I can absorb and explore other disciplines of knowledge and find moments of resonance between them. I’ve been influenced by ritual, anthropology, geology, and new materialism. One of my favorite books is Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad. One of the core ideas of the book is Agential Realism, a theory that objects, people, and things emerge through their relationship with each other, with no pre-existence. The world is constantly in a state of becoming. In a way, if you believe the theory, working in real time feels closer to how the world operates.
EB: What advice would you give to emerging artists who are interested in working with code, video, and systems-based approaches?
Stay curious, push past the default, and build community.
