Barrie James Sutcliffe DJ-set

For most of his career Barrie has been using a collage aesthetic to investigate how we relate to each other, the world, and to technology. He is interested in creatively using research from the physical and natural sciences and the question about how to approach research in the fine arts.

Spanning visual, sound, installation, and performative arts, Barrie has exhibited primary in artist-run or non-profit situations, and is a visiting lecturer at the Valand School of Fine Arts in Göteborg, Sweden.

Presently Barrie has been working with sound installation and noise music performance. The performances consist of analog electronics, digital sampling, and a kind of constrained dance within radio waves.

Key questions relate to the use of sound in space and the bodily perception of it, the persistence or survival of meaningful information through various destructive processes, and a focus on the act of selection and decision as central to the identity and function of consciousness. Within all this, the idea of the space and context encoding itself within the sound recording or performance is primary.

His focus over the past years has ranged from neuroscience, quantum mechanics, urban theory and planning, architecture, information study, western occult literature, contemporary particle physics, graphic expressionism, valve electronics, microcontrollers, analog audio tape, turntables, and other such noise-making devices.

He is interested in art practice as a research process that is not reducible to a textual form or otherwise easily explainable, specifically rejecting the the idea that an art theory could explain both the creative process and the contemporary climate of art production, as well as a finished work of art.

To further this he has been writing absurd textual works which clumsily attempt to juxtapose academic writing, casual writing, and poetic writing into a dense yet open framework which refuses to elaborate itself in ways we expect.