Section

Artist Residency

Classification

ArtistProfile

Artist

Martin Howse

Curator

Michal Kindernay

Martin Howse is a British programmer, writer, performer, artist and explorer, working in the fields of discourse, speculative hardware (environmental data in open physical systems), code (an examination of layers of abstraction), free software and the situational (performances and interventions).

 

Howse’s work is heavily improvised, playing within the collapse of massed, barely functional salvaged equipment and software systems made manifest in sound/noise and image. He presents a complex, process-driven constructivist performance; the symphonic rise of the attempt to piece together fugal systematics is played out against the noise of collapse and machine crash at the deserted border of control.

Howse has performed and collaborated worldwide using custom software and hardware modules for audible/visible code/noise generation. Over the last ten years he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide. From 1998 to 2005 Howse was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. From 2007 to 2009 he hosted a regular workshop, micro-residency and salon series in Berlin. Howse has worked and collaborated on acclaimed projects and practices such as The Crystal World, Psychogeophysics, Earthboot, Sketches towards an Earth Computer and Dissolutions. He is also the creator of the skin-driven audio divination noise module, The Dark Interpreter, and the ERD modular synthesizer series.

During his Prague residency, Howse will continue on his research. In addition, he will begin collaborating on a new film, Pilgrim, with Johana Švarcová. A docu-road-movie will capture at length the journey of the artist Howse, who travels across Europe with his mobile laboratory. Along the way, he creates a new work of art — a software device with which he wants to connect with the time of our planet, with the dimensions of materialization and with a history of time, several million years old. Howse will also prepare a site-specific performance on 22 July 2020 at Invalidovna.


The Agosto Foundation artist in residence program is supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture.