Haroon Mirza: Creating a sculpture with light, sound and video

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0:30to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. In this edition, we take you back to 2019.

0:50On a large screen, a woman speaks. At times, her image becomes ghostly and distorted. Disjointed subtitles appear, pulses of sound vibrate around you and lights flash. Welcome to the work of Haroon Mirza. It's not like you're observing the work, you know, like in the classical sense of a painting or a sculpture. You're standing at one point, the painting is in front of you and there's this sort of separation. It's more like you're immersed in the work. You hear it, you see it, you feel the vibrations. It's multi-sensorial. I'm Una Cousins and this is the programme that follows the world's leading creative artists to find out how they work and think.

1:37It is a bright, beautiful early morning in East London and I'm cycling along the River Lea. The River Lea runs down the east side of London from north to south, headed for the River Thames. And it also runs between my house and Haroon Merza's studio. Hello, Haroon. How are you? Bad moment. Sorry, just not bad. I mean, it's a fine moment, but there's too many things scheduled at the same time. The British sound and installation artist Haroon Merza has a lot on. He's been nominated for several international awards and he exhibits around the world. In the month when I first meet him, Haroon has two exhibitions launching at the same time.

2:28One is a vast collection of past works, but the other is a completely new piece, and it's this that I'll be following in the programme. Things sort of lying around everywhere at the moment because we have a lot of work to produce right now for shows coming up. We haven't put any bookshelves up yet, so we just have these books in piles and records in piles on the floor down here. And it's not just a few books and records. You've got masses of books and records stacked up here. They're kind of a wall. You've got the great deal of music and literature. And then take us into my favourite corner of your studio, which is this sort of drawers of cables and nuts and bolts and wires.

3:08What's going on here? So this is basically an electronics workshop. We develop all the kind of electronics that we use in the works. And most of it is all bespoke. So it's all stuff that we kind of develop here. What are the fundamental components that make up your artwork? There's LED lighting, audiovisual equipment, wires and cables, either purposefully arranged or in geometric forms or just dangling, electronic devices. All of these things together create environments. That generates a kind of experience, but an experience not just of observation, of seeing things but also of hearing things and physical responses to the body.

3:52It's like standing in an apothecary's chamber. But out of these reels of wire and electrical components, Haroon will create his latest work, 111. Inspiration for the piece comes from CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, famous for its Nobel Award-winning discovery of the Higgs boson, or God Particle. Haroon was invited to take residency there, along with his current collaborator, Jack Jelfs. Over several months, they interviewed theoretical physicists, recorded sounds and interrogated ideas of maths as a universal language. CERN have got an arts programme, and they've got quite a few different yearly residencies that happen.

4:39And the one that we did is called the Collide International Award. You go and you live at CERN for two months as an artist. I mean, it was really weird. It was a bit like being on a school trip because we're all, like, being taken underground to these detectors by, you know, people in hard hats. And then, like, being on the set of a James Bond film. So it was a very bizarre, abstract experience, but I think everyone, every one of us got a lot out of it. and it's stuff that we're still sort of processing now. There are three weeks left before Haroon and Jack will be showing the installation created from ideas inspired by the CERN residency.

5:20It will be part of an exhibition called Broken Symmetries, launching at the Fact Gallery in Liverpool in the north of England. Then it will go on to tour the world for the next five years. Bringing together a host of elements, Haroon and Jack will explore ideas of language, meaning and experience Jack explains how those ideas will become a physical reality. The piece is an installation. There's a video screen with a little film that Haroon and I made. There's also a circle of eight speakers. It's about a four metre wide circle. What we're looking at is a gallery floor plan and this is the room.

6:01So this square here is the room that the workers are going to occupy. so there's a circle in the middle and that represents the carpet. We have a piece of carpet in it so that you can sit in the middle of the circle and hanging above the circle of speakers like a chandelier is this octagon with strips of LEDs on and when the LEDs light up the signal that goes to the LEDs also goes to a specific speaker so you get kind of light and sound in synchronisation. And that's all synchronised to what's happening on the video. And on the video, there's a person speaking, reading out a text, and that's interspersed with a computer-generated representation of the same person who's reading out another text using a speech synthesiser.

6:55And then as the piece progresses, various subtitles start appearing on the screen, which are different words to what's being spoken and there's two sets of subtitles so really there's sort of four texts happening at you simultaneously in conjunction with the kind of sound and the light so the sounds of the electrical signals which are being sent to the leds move around the circle of speakers and there's also quite near the end of the piece a box that i built which kind of scrambles the video signal and the sound of the video starts kicking in. So the whole piece starts off quite intelligible and gradually over eight minutes sort of just descends into being much more of a sensation of colour and noise.

7:46The digital brains behind these sensations are electronic inventions developed by Haroon and Jack to play and distort video and sound. Up until today, they've worked on them in separate spaces, but now, for the first time, they're bringing their work together in Haroon's studio. Today's an important day because we've sort of done things in isolation, you know, and we've seen things in their sort of basic form, but we haven't seen the piece as a surround sound with the video playing, and then we haven't done the interaction at all, you know, so this is quite unknown. So basically what Jack's device essentially does is take the red, green and blue colours of video signal and mess around with them basically.

8:35So like either bring different colours in and different colours out and then affects the horizontal, what's it called? The horizontal sink. The sink, yeah. So you see these sort of lines as well. We had like a rough version of what it might do a couple of weeks ago, but not like this. Yeah, that was good. That was quite good of me. Yeah, I knew you. So that's the first time we've seen everything working together. Now it's just like compositional things that we need to do. A bit of editing to the video and then the interaction, how they interact with each other, those two devices. And this is also the first time we've heard it in surround sound as well.

9:14And how did you feel about it? It works really well. I kind of had a good idea of how it works from just coming from my device, but I wasn't sure about the sounds, but the sounds work really well. they're really sort of distorted and you know it's like an interference which is kind of a nice thing

9:35one of the things we're really interested in was the sort of weird disconnect between consciousness and matter you know matter is just kind of meaningless and you know meaning only resides in the mind ultimately and this piece kind of quite nicely disintegrates from being meaningful and linguistic into just turning into this kind of electrical physical kind of chaos

10:12so now i have to count the number of times my video synth triggers and then we can compose with it. Did you get it? I think so. Apparently there's 103 of those little disturbances.

10:36When it starts in the 4-4 Yeah. So from there, yeah. When it goes to this slow 4-4. Yeah, okay. So from there, maybe throw a couple in, bits where it goes, like the one-one-one frequency.

11:02Why is that the best place? You're very particular about it, it shouldn't be there and it's the best when it starts. Yeah, because it's just about acoustic overload, you know, like when there's too many things going on at the same time, acoustically it sounds just messy.

11:19But, I mean, this is closer. What we're doing now is closest to music composition anyway, this part. You know, it's like it's a thing that evolves in time with sound and rhythm. I think of it as music, and when we're doing this bit, I think of it musically.

11:35To clean up the sounds, Jack takes his device away to reprogram the visual and acoustic distortions it manufactures. It's not just sounds which are composed by Haroon, but spaces. When you see these installations for the first time, they can be a confusing wash of sensations. Lights flash while sounds erupt and objects are laid out with some kind of inexplicable precision. Evident, but not immediately understandable. But behind the scenes, every detail of these works is carefully considered. And it begins early on in the process, as Haroon shows me in his notebooks. This is like compositional stuff.

12:23So this is how I would compose electronic signals. It's basically numbers. In this instance, probably 1 to 3, but 0, 0, 0, 0. So these are kind of scores of sorts. This is like a sequence of events in a staging of performance. Lights off, video starts, video glitches and freezes. Lights on, orchestra score begins, 10 minutes. Lights out. Is that what it says? Lights out, video begins, video glitches. So this is like a sequence. So just to describe it, on the page what we've got here is a list of instructions with arrows that is leading which thing happens afterwards, the sequence of events. I mean, I don't know why the arrows are there, because it's reading like a normal, but, you know, it's like kind of...

13:02And on the page before your composition was... What it looks like is sort of a series of dashes and circles, and this is your composing of electricity, of rhythm. It's a polyrhythm thing where the time signature of a beat of a pattern may change. And then trying to figure this out in doing it with electronics, doing it with on-off signals. So this is basically each step of the sequence. Here I'm just trying to figure out how I would do that in a digital, like in a programmable kind of way, so turning things on and off, turning electrical pulse on and off. Back in the studio, Haroon and Jack are discussing the subtitles that cover the video element of their installation.

13:44The dynamics of the subtitles Like the ebb and flow of them And the dynamics of what the sound is doing They peak in slightly different places at the moment And it might be cool to kind of just rearrange the subtitles a bit And get them I don't know if it's necessary Let's see what it's like Let's see what it's like I just found there's this certain point on the subtitles Where they suddenly pop off But it kind of happens at a weird bit when it happens in a bit that doesn't seem to match. You know what I could do? I could just give you a recording of your audio and then you can just do it to the audio.

14:22Yeah, that'd be good. I can drop the audio of the LEDs onto the video file and then you can do the subtitles in relation to that. That'd be good. I think it might be too contrived, though. But let's have a look. Yeah, let's just see what happens. Let's just have a look. Jack was my route into physics in a way. I've got a physics degree and a master's. I knew nothing about physics. Because of his knowledge in physics, he almost became like my physics tutor. You guys both seem so calm about the process. Yeah. That's the good thing about working with somebody else, and especially Haroon, because I really trust him.

15:08If you're collaborating with somebody who you trust, which you have to to collaborate with anybody, then you can be quite calm. And Haroon's got so much experience at doing this kind of thing that I'm happy to kind of trust him and, you know, he obviously trusts me as well, which is... Yeah, that's why it seems like that. This process of invention needs constant problem-solving. And around every corner is another technical challenge.

15:44what's that cutting out thing do you think i don't know it wasn't doing that last time it wasn't what's changed though are you saying it's a setting on the it might be a setting on one of the uh one of those video adapters that are in my video synth what's going on and is it a worry no no it's not a worry it's just technical stuff this is just kind of um the laborious part of you know working with electronics and this is why we have to do everything so much in advance to be able to like you know keep coming back and testing every time you do a little shift and a change to come back and keep testing it okay so what's not working at the moment the audio that's coming out from jack's device is it's not coming out basically the other thing is that so jack's device takes the video that i'm outputting from my device and it manipulates the videos for some reason now every time that happens every time jack's device manipulates the video the tv screen cuts out so what i'm seeing in front of me sort of almost looks like a homemade spacecraft the control center there's different metal boxes and knobs to turn and lights flashing and is it right to say that essentially the communication between all these different devices that you've is somehow not quite working.

17:01Yeah. You know, there's a lot going on, you know. And because it is, you know, it's all DIY and developed here or in Jack's studio, it's all a process. It's all an R &D process. You're the only ones that can figure this out because this is your device. Yeah. Both of these things, they're unique things. There's only one of these in the world. I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom, and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists, and experts about how markets really work.

17:44And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions and how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You're listening to In The Studio from the BBC World Service with me, Una Cousins following the work of sound and installation artist Haroon Mirza After a morning's hard problem solving, it's time for lunch We're going to go across the road that way into that sort of trading estate where there's a guy that's quite well known for his falafel wraps. Can I get three falafel wraps please? Right now we're watching the falafel guy chop up some meat.

18:39It's just sort of evocative of one of your earlier pieces. Tacky tack. Just like he's chopping up the meat here the chef, the street chef in Lahore was also mincing up meat, chopping up meat with spatulas just like this one but he was doing the two and his you know the the way in which he was uh chopping the meat up was very sort of performative and poetic you know so it was rhythmic and it was like done as a performance there was different you know it was composed sonically composed and and physically composed and uh that's what you know inspired me for that piece to kind of make to make that work to start documenting that in video and to then make a piece around that was um you know like we're here now you know ordering food and you know observing how that food is prepared you know that's uh that's how that piece came about

19:45where did your interest in sound develop music has played a big role in my life ever since I was a child. Either my dad listened to music or having kawali parties in our house. Kawali is like a South Asian musical genre, I guess, and it comes from certain Islamic traditions, Sufism and these kinds of things, where music is used as a transcendental to kind of get close to God, basically. Music and dance. Yeah, and then just being into music, just enjoying music. How did this lifelong interest in music come into your artwork and develop into an art practice? When I came to the point where I might be interested in making music and the type of music I was interested in at that point, everything was being done on computers and I found that really boring and laborious.

20:39I was never interested or never had the patience to make music, but I DJed quite a lot, so I would DJ. and it wasn't until much later on where I realised that I could generate sounds in other ways from electronic components, LED lighting or things, which is a very unconventional way to generate sound.

21:00Three weeks have passed. The machines are synced, distortions composed and subtitles edited. Haroon, Jack and Haroon's assistant, Steph, are packing up the reams of cables and fragile components for shipping to the gallery in Liverpool. The installation opens next week. Do you want me to measure it now? Yeah, it's definitely 17 inches wide. What's that? I don't know what that is in metric.

21:36We are in Liverpool. Staff have already assembled the piece at the Fact Gallery in Liverpool. But as a brand new installation, it's essential that the artist is there to check it over, putting in the finishing touches on site. Jack's arrived early to get started. Later this afternoon, Haroon will join him. I've bought this new little electrical box that I might actually install somewhere in the path of where the signal's going, from Haroon's box to the TV, which I think will improve the picture quality a lot. And now that you've switched it on, we're looking at this big screen, and we're waiting.

22:19We're waiting. OK, that's such better picture quality. Thank you. Thank the Lord. So standing back a bit. OK, so we've moved to the back of the room.

22:37Yep, you can definitely read all the writing on the screen. Yeah. It's clear. The video synth is working. So it all looks like it's working. So Haroon's going to arrive in a bit. And we have to put the new video, we have to load the new video into his box. Now that he's seen it works, Jack has to actually fit the component, which improves the picture quality.

23:09It sort of looks like you've disembowelled your device and all these cables are kind of vomiting out the front of it. Yeah, I know, and it's kind of up on its side as well. It's now the afternoon and Haroon is winding his way through a maze of dark, echoing exhibition rooms at the gallery. It will be the first time he sees the piece in situ. You hear the installation before you see it. To enter, you pull back a thick black curtain. I treat fingers. Oh, white space instead of black space, that's good. Why is that good? Because everything's really dark and gloomy around there. This is good. These speakers are much larger in scale than I imagined.

24:04And the acoustics are totally fine. So if I clap my hands, we get like a kind of limited decay there, which is great. So there's not much echo. The moment you walk into the room, somehow everything feels different. There's an odd reverence to the standing circle of speakers in the middle of the space. And this is where that attention to all these different elements that Haroon is famous for starts to make sense. But despite careful planning, this brand new installation throws up all sorts of technical hurdles in the last 48 hours before opening. Oh, look at that. So that's broken. Ah, so part of the chandelier is broken, the circuit.

24:53Yeah. Basically, we need to take this down, and that needs to be repaired. Can we solder it? Can we solder onto that stuff? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sort of like a bit of wire on the cross. The copper tape is torn. It's no longer... The voltage is no longer getting through, so I need to just join that together again. I need to find a... OK, so you've fixed the circuit on the chandelier, and it's hung again. What's the next step? Now the next step is go back to where I was earlier, and that is to test if all the channels are working. One of the speakers that has been delivered, brand new, out of the box, doesn't work.

25:33So we're going to improvise with other speakers that factor. And then the other problem is that when I transferred the new videos, the latest videos, onto the Emerging Paradigm device, it has corrupted. The videos are stored, so the videos aren't working anymore. So I need to open up this device and put them back in and hope that works. It's just technical stuff that you just have to get through and work out. Until literally the very last moment when it all comes together. Install's in a pretty good place, everything's technically working, so now it's just, like, sort of detailing, aesthetic details, like making sure the cables are, you know, done elegantly.

26:19And then we're kind of done, you know, vacuum.