Threads of thinking, added to as they develop. Some entries are finished pieces; some are notes left deliberately open. The threads are where coherence gathers; the list below is simply what's most recent.
The threads
The oldest idea in my work, and the one I keep returning to: that a work of art isn't finished by the person who makes it. It's completed by the person who looks. A face on a screen, a crowd in a square, a cadaver in a Rembrandt — each becomes its real subject only through the attention brought to it. These are pieces about that act, and what it asks of us.
My brother Francis composed Urdance — 'a ballet of the mind' — and never recorded it. After he died, I found the score in a mouse-eaten bag in his garage. This is the thread where I chart the attempt to bring the work back to life, and where I keep running into the real difficulty: how do you collaborate with the dead? It's the most personal thing here, and the least resolved.
Pieces about where I come from — family, inheritance, the codes I was raised inside — examined with love and without absolution. I'm not interested in blame, and I'm not interested in letting anyone off either; both are ways of not looking. The narrator here is one of them, not standing outside looking in. Hagiography and hatchet-job are both evasions. This is the attempt at something truer than either.
A city, and an argument about it. York made me, and I've no intention of leaving it — which is also a position about where ambitious creative work can happen, and who gets to make it. These are pieces about the place: its UNESCO designation, its future, and the case for building things here rather than somewhere that's supposed to matter more.
Notes on being human alongside AI — written by someone who admires the machine and works next to it every day, not someone frightened of it. The question isn't whether machines can make things; they plainly can. It's where human value sits once they can, and whether, having industrialised attention the way we once industrialised food, enough of us will start wanting it made with more care again. I might be wrong about that. These are the arguments where I work it out.
Recent
A 1976 diary entry; a stuffed marrow forgotten in the oven, a Triumph with failing brakes, and a frantic dash south to the Reading Festival, where my brother, Francis, made it to the stage with one minute to spare, becomes the starting point for a reflection on risk and spontaneity in live performance, and what's lost when shows grow too polished to leave the audience any part to play.
A silent installation of strangers' faces, each looking straight ahead, telling half a story the viewer must complete by stepping up to meet their gaze. In this catalogue essay, Professor Jenna Ng reflects on People We Love as storytelling at its most abstract and democratic — and on what that wordless exchange reveals about being human together.
A 1972 photograph in the garden of Shandy Hall of a local odd-jobs-man, an actor playing Laurence Sterne, and my mother, opens a reflection on arriving in a tight-knit North Yorkshire village from 'away', the community that has since vanished, and a childhood sense of dislocation that never quite lifted. A meditation on belonging, outsiderness, and how a landscape might hold the key to coming to terms with oneself.
Between 2005 and 2017, KMA's interactive installations chased one radical question: can you stage a compelling theatrical event where there's no line between performer and audience? Only Congregation came close. Now, in an age of AI, that question feels newly urgent — and a fresh collaboration is reopening it.
Reviving Urdance was never going to be a simple matter of interpretation. Drawing on Francis's own words about the piece's unfinished, ever-shifting nature, I weigh the creative licence he left me against the practical void of time and budget — and the daunting task of turning a hand-written score into something living and breathing. It's a story of digital transcription, generous collaborators, and the question of whether samples can ever sound truly alive.
The breakthrough on Urdance came from an unlikely source: Jack Wingad, a sound editor at our post-production house who, never having known Francis, took on the piece between jobs. In this post I let Jack describe his own approach, and reflect on what it means to honour Francis's 'no barriers' spirit — through Nick Cave's idea of vulnerability — by being brave enough to break the work creatively rather than slavishly second-guess a dead composer's intentions.
Twenty years ago a collaboration with Phoenix Dance Theatre changed the course of my life, setting me on a path through interactive art and into founding ViridianFX. Last Thursday I returned to their company for a motion-capture session — and the music was Urdance, my late brother's experimental 1987 work, reborn for the launch of CoStar Live Lab. Here I trace the echoes across time that brought me back to where I began.
Last week Urdance took its first public step back into the world in decades, performed at the CoSTAR LiveLab launch with live dancers, their motion-capture avatars, and a 28-speaker ambisonic mix. This is my reflection on a deliberately unfinished first outing — exhilarating, imperfect, and revealing — and on what it taught me about where my late brother's living composition might go next.
Last night's Reignite 3 event left me more excited about York than I can remember being. Part celebration of the city's creative resurgence under its UNESCO City of Media Arts status, part personal history stretching back to a thumb-sized souvenir book in childhood, this is a warm reflection on why a city built for gathering feels uniquely full of possibility in an age of AI.
While clearing my late brother Francis's chaotic house, I hunted for any surviving trace of Urdance — a 1987 synthesiser-and-orchestra work, never studio-recorded, that the two had discussed resurrecting together. Part eulogy, part detective story, this opens a series on reviving the piece, and on the strange question at its heart: how do you collaborate with the dead?
Why is a significant VFX studio choosing to build its future in York rather than London? This talk, given at York's first Reignite event, makes the case that the city's UNESCO City of Media Arts status — paired with a vision for inclusive creative-education pathways from preschool to industry — could position it as the UK's leading human-centred alternative to the capital, just as AI begins to hollow out work built on efficiency alone.
If a machine can complete Schubert's unfinished symphony convincingly enough to move an audience, what's left for the human artist — and for us, the audience? Drawing on Brian Eno's idea that art happens inside the viewer, not the object, this catalogue essay frames the installation People We Love as an argument for valuing our role as imaginative co-creators, and for meeting AI not with anxiety but by upping our game as audiences.
What gives the Mona Lisa its grip on us — and could that same pull live in the face of a stranger? Starting from da Vinci's enigmatic gaze, this piece traces empathy back to a single human impulse: the urge to read what's behind another's eyes. It introduces People We Love, an installation that turns that act of imagining into the artwork itself — unsaleable, unreproducible, made anew in each viewer.
I've always been struck by Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp — not for its cadaver, but for the way the act of looking transforms the onlookers into the painting's real subjects. Here I trace that idea from the painting to my own KMA installation, Strange Attractors, and to what still fascinates me: how simply looking, or being looked at, can turn a viewer into the viewed.