Harvestworks Art and Technology Program presented Nick Brooke’s artwork extant, in the exhibition Time Based Art: Space and Time in Tune, from May 17-Aug 24 2025. extant is an immersive sonic installation about mechanisms for navigation—based on my grandfather’s sextant, which he used to disappear to Tahiti (I never met him). I’m using modern technologies (mini-gyros, arduinos and surround sound) and connecting them to older ways of navigation (the sextant) to make an audience see, touch, and learn these devices.
Full text from the exhibit:
“ I got left my grandfather’s sextant, a sea navigation device, along with his diaries, which reflect a growing obsession with Tahiti, then celestial navigation, then scribblings of how to make the trip: charts of Venus and the sun. I never met him. He left my Dad, sailing around the world. In the last years, I’ve learned to navigate, and I see this hand-me-down as a way to find him.
The sextant is based on imprecise science--it relies on where you thought you were yesterday, on the high seas, to predict your current position. In this installation, try the sextant out: line up a star with the horizon in the split lens. As you do this, your location is sensed, but always in respect with where you were a while ago. The longer you are in the installation, the longer the generative system loses itself.
Extant reflects on “absence-of-field” effects— classic psychoacoustic experiments, such as Shepard tones and rhythm--acoustical barber poles--that are based on how fast they travel, not where they are, and they get lost over time. Amidst this sonic disorientation, you orient yourself against programmed odds. “
Hypnagogia is a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness, in which people experience sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and tics. Hypnagogia will be developed as a collaboration between Meret Schlegel and Nick Brooke at the Tanzhaus Zürich in June 2025. Both Meret and Nick have hypnagogia, where sudden “sleep starts”, or bursts of energy through a limb, push one back into a waking state.
The piece explores the tension between immobility and hyperactivity, and the sounds are generated on the spot. Alternating high and low tones are filtered and processed to become echoes of each other. The generative music is affected by accelerometers strapped to the mover’s body. In turn, electric stimulants create involuntary muscle contractions or twitches during the installation. These tics are unpredictable, wirelessly generated by the sounds themselves, and are part of the improvisatory vocabulary—a borderline between intentional and unexpected, sleep and wakefulness.
Click below for our upcoming showing at Tanzhaus Zürich!
Barrel Roll refers to the spiral and torque of a barrel, such as a mechanical cylinder on a player piano, or the downward careening of a biplane.
The piece is a tiny, self-contained device, made out of a yoga block, a music box, and motors. I will give this device freely to multiple choreographers to generate their own music. Playing with the topos of music box and toy ballerina, the tiny mechanism is exploded out through contact mikes, stepper motors, and motion sensors to create a generative, interactive piece that transcends the toy. Inverting the trope, the dancer’s movement literally turns the barrel and creates the sound, which is processed and, in turn, gyrates the dancer and sound design. All the programming, and generative sound is housed within the small portable mechanism.
Barrel roll is in development as of Fall 2025.