Oliver Jennings on visual music, sculpted sound and temperamental plants

We featured Oliver Jennings as one of our Graduates in 2013. Since then his Every Object Has a Spirit project has taken him to The Chelsea Flower Show, he’s been making work as an audio-visual artist and video director and been performing at music festivals all over. We caught up with him to find out more about art, music and horticulture.

Was there a clear point in your studies when you shifted from design to audio-visual work? Had you been making music before?

Yes, definitely. When I pinched my friend’s camera which had HD-video and started to film certain things I was working on in my graphic design projects, the camera gave me a way more dynamic and insightful way of exploring things graphically and a way of changing the context of the object/thing I was exploring.

I have been playing music since I was about 12, firstly guitar, and then messing about making electronic stuff since I was about 15. My production skills never really got me anywhere, I’d have hundreds of projects with five-second ideas and then I could never be bothered to sit and painstakingly compose them into coherent tracks. There are infinite ways this can be done but when I started thinking about sound and documenting its source through film, it gave me constraints to work within and made me explore it in more of a physical and visual way. For example, I like to think that my Every Object Has a Spirit project is a piece of music that has been informed by various architectural and sculptural constructions.

How has your work with plants affected other projects? Because the results are so dependent on environments/conditions and responsive would you say it has impacted how you think about music and environments more broadly?

The work with plants is very temperamental, because you don’t know how they are going to behave. At The Chelsea Flower Show they produced hardly any notes for the first day which was worrying, perhaps there was a problem with the technology, perhaps they were adjusting to the environment, I don’t know.

What I like about Music of The Plants is that it is mysterious, I certainly am not trying to convince people that plants think and see what’s going on around them because that is Anthropomorphism and would be silly. I am trying to hint at a different type of consciousness and a form of awareness of the environment which is reflected in the plants behaviour, they do seem to be very good reflectors of what is going on around them.

When we interviewed you for the Graduates feature you mentioned sonic “spirits” relating to John Cage’s work. Wanting to communicate the life of perceptibly inanimate objects, would you say that that still stands as a drive?

Yes, it is still a main drive of mine. The reason I want to explore the spirit within inanimate objects is because I want to be able to look at things I have conditioned myself over a lifetime to see a certain way, in a different way. As soon as you are able to look at a familiar object like a radiator, cutlery, or a coffee percolator as having a type of spirit which is frozen within its physical form and which can be brought to life by setting it into vibration, it becomes a completely alien object and has nothing to do with its function. You start to broaden your restricting barriers of logic and think like other ancient cultures.

My work at the time I made Every Object Has a Spirit was very influenced by Susan Hiller who’s concerned with the idea that our sense reality is very limited by our trust in scientific logic. Her work on amplifying silence over and over again until ghostly voices appeared and words were recorded from them fascinated me, it made me think if you can hear these voices, then why can’t they exist in a certain way?

My next big project will hopefully turn a building into a sound sculpture. Using the audience as a means of setting sections of the building into vibration as they are exploring it, the spirit of the building will be released.

You developed Music of the Plants at The Chelsea Flower Show last year, do you have plans to do any more with it?

Yes, I have a Music of the Plants exhibition at Summerhall in Edinburgh next month for which I am collaborating with Australian writer Sarah Jones. I will be using the plants to select sections of her poetry at random. This’ll be exhibited alongside work by Collins and Gotto which I am very excited about, as they’re a leading force in exploring our interactions with nature. Their latest work explores artists and musicians working with technologists and scientists to reveal the biogenic interaction of trees with the changing atmospheric chemistry of cities. I would eventually like to explore more organic sound in plants on a microscopic level, at the moment the Music of the Plants work explores a digital conversion of the plants behaviour and not real sound from within the plant.

Your visual work also seems to be driven by details, and as you said “revealing hidden natural structures.” Would you say that your concerns/ideas/interests run consistently and whether a project ends up being visual, sound, or audio-visual is a decision made later on in the project?

Studying graphic design helps you to be logical with how you make sense of and present your findings or your work. It teaches you about context, how people can interact with it and the best way to communicate your point. So with the The Chelsea Flower Show project for example, originally we wanted to build a big orchestral podiums for the plants. After refining it we started to talk about introducing visualisers, graphic representations of plants and microscopic shots to make it a multi-faceted communication of how alive these plants were.

I love it when different medias interact with each other in the same piece. I tried to achieve this with my installation of Every Object Has a Spirit by having the original objects I was exploring laid out under the film so that you could see them in reality and then in this new enhanced reality made up of weird shrines and moving installations.

When working on music videos, what’s your process? Do you ever collaborate on the sound elements as well as visuals?

My music video practice has become very digital due to the nature of the music I am working with, although I am still exploring natural structures within it. I have just finished a commission for a very interesting LA based artist called Jaust, who was originally a composer and sound designer for video games. It interested me because as we move further into the digital realm, the way in which nature and natural structures are being represented is becoming better and better, to the point now where an organic digital form is like its own form of nature.

There are people who record videos of the landscapes within PS3 games now, they are breathtakingly beautiful, and this appreciation of digital nature is something that is going to increase whether we like it or not. So the video is a statement about how we’re at the dawn of a new type of nature and I wanted it to have a primeval feel about it. I created these organic digital landscapes and used interpretations of real life materials, metals, and lighting, mainly using cinema 4D to explore a primitive digital landscape.

This collision of nature and technology is something I have started to explore in live performances as well, and it made up my set at MIRA festival last year.

Art + Music

This month we will be looking at the infinite, somewhat holy connection between art and music in all its different genres. Spanning an enormous amount of ways music and art come together, this feature will take a closer look at stage design, record sleeves, music videos, zines, rock star painters, band merchandise, music at fashion shows and much, much more. Now put your hands together for Art + Music.