Glasshouse Deep is a journey into the minute world of the strange deep, where the very small assumes a planetary scale. Reflective, refractive, luminous, each organic/entity(s) temporal evolution is layered with the motion of a trajectory through points in space. Speculative migrations both vertical and horizontal follow orbits that telescope inwards and outwards.

The organics that populate the Glasshouse Deep claim ancestry from plants but of the minute kind, single-celled algae – diatoms. Like plants they turn sunlight into chemical energy through photosynthesis, but unlike plants diatoms also mysteriously possess a urea cycle, a feature that they share with animals. This incredible hybridity has been attributed to the incorporation of genes from their ancestors and by horizontal gene transfer from marine bacteria. Extraordinary in their diversity of form, planktonic, adnate and stalked, diatoms are chimeras with glass exoskeletons, exhibiting the most intricate bilateral and radial symmetry. A symmetry that is seen is other equally unexpected spaces as well. In the digital domain, video feedback demonstrates that some systems have the ability to spontaneously organize themselves into increasingly complex structures.

Glasshouse Deep is the latest in a suite of works that employ video-feedback to explore processes of growth and evolution through a technological matrix. The work aims to discover and extend the underlying laws and processes, arising from fundamental physics and chemistry, which govern growth and form in biological systems and it’s mirroring in the digital sphere.

Light is a central protagonist. The intensity and spectral quality of light induces migration and behavioral photo protection in diatoms . Video feedback occurs when a loop is created between a video camera and a television screen or monitor. This dynamic recursive flow of light between camera and monitor generates startling and beautiful forms. Disks of expanding and contracting light reveal oscillating points/dots, gradually dislocating radiating pinwheels and star bursts exhibit complex patterns and colour, flowing outward from the center, demonstrating that at every higher level of complexity, there is greater potential for new structure and change.

The work combines images and research of diatom specimens sampled at different times of the year and during different seasons by scientists Minji Lee and Sanjoon Park from the KIOST. These images form the base upon which layers of video-feedback build intricate and delicate forms that explore the structural coloration of diatoms that gives them their other names ‘jewels of the sea’ or ‘living opals’.

As much as light, sound is a central part of the work. Building on the iconic and deeply moving “Venus, The Bringer of Peace”, from “The Planets” (Op. 32) orchestral suite composed by Gustav Holst in 1914-1916 , the sound feeds back on its self, mirroring the depth and thickness of water, simultaneously drawing us upwards and outwards.

Glasshouse Deep was Commissioned by the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee, 2021
(Diatom Specimens collected and photographed by Minji Lee and Joonsang Park, Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology KIOST)

My practice over the past few years has been rooted in science. The work has taken many directions, driven sometimes by an exploration of the self-organization of pattern, morphology and morphological relationships to a more recent interest in processes of emergence or the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. For the past few years I have been working with the medium of video-feedback to create a series of works that explore processes of growth and evolution through a technological matrix.

Since the raw material for the video works was video-feedback I’d like to add a small note on the medium and the process by which it is generated. In principle very similar to the old kaleidoscopes, video feedback is created when any ordinary hand-held camera is plugged into a TV and then made to point at itself. The optical equivalent of acoustic feedback, a loop is created between the video camera and the television screen or monitor. Like two mirrors facing each other, the image is doubled and interferes with itself. With patience and certain amount of trial and error it becomes possible to explore a vast arena of spontaneous pattern generation by varying the available controls (brightness, contrast, hue, focus, camera angle etc).

                                                        still frames of the diverse behavior video feedback can exhibit

In principle very similar to the old kaleidoscopes, video feedback is created when any ordinary hand-held camera is plugged into a TV and then made to point at itself.The optical equivalent of acoustic feedback, a loop is created between the video camera and the television screen or monitor. Like two mirrors facing each other, the image is doubled and interferes with itself.

                                                     The basic set up for video feedback, a camera plugged into a TV. 

With patience and certain amount of trial and error it becomes possible to explore a vast arena of spontaneous pattern generation by varying the available controls (brightness, contrast, hue, focus, camera angle etc). The result is an amazing array of spatio-temporal patterns, mimicking those exhibited by physical, chemical, and biological systems, i.e. plant structures, cells, tree forms, bacteria, snowflakes… They are not imposed from the outside in any way and are entirely self generated within the loop.

Once this footage has been shot, I transfer it to my computer. The footage is then sorted and classified. The actual work that emerges from this is the result of manually stitching together layers of video in Adobe Premier. Much like a backwards jigsaw puzzle the work is gradually articulated and constructed with hundreds of layers of video.

In my practice I find that media and method are almost indivisible. Whether print, video or large site specific drawings, many hundreds of layers of video, image, paint, charcoal etc, are layered, stacked, sorted, merged, and rearranged to try and understand how complexity develops, both in terms of surface, content and form. In the way that fractals are a way of visualizing chaotic behaviour, the creatures/forms I create are an exploration of the nature of complexity, rooted in the iteration or repetition of simple rules and simple processes. With the videos the raw footage, i.e. video feedback as well as the pieces themselves investigate self-reflexivity, which, adds another dimension to the role of media and how in so many cases the conceptual is embedded in the material.

projects with videofeedback

DOPPELGANGER | double channel video | 2011

GHOSTS-IN-THE-MACHINE | single channel video projected onto frame | 2006

BONE TREE | archival pigment prints | 2014

BLOODLINES | video and print installation | 2009

CHRYSALIS | mixed media on archival pigment prints | 2011

PROTEUS | colour pencil, acrylic on archival pigment print|60 x 60 inches|2011

ARBOREAL | single channel video | 2011

FOSSUS | single channel video projected on sandstone relief | 2011

This series began with an exploration of L-systems or the Lindenmayer system, a formal grammar most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, introduced and developed in 1968 by the Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist Aristid Lindenmayer. L-System rules are recursive in nature, which in turn leads to self-similarity and thereby fractal like forms that mimic branching patterns in the natural world. Bone Tree is not modelled on any algorithms or programs. Each piece has been constructed with manually placed layers of video stills generated using video-feedback.

I am interested in the inversion of the uncanny. Where Freud held that the uncanny is very often neither supernatural nor particularly mysterious in its origin, but rather, completely familiar, I am interested in working with material that is quite extraordinary in its origins, and its subsequent making into the familiar, the almost mundane. Yet, because of the nature of its origins, it retains a quality of the uncanny. The tree is not a tree, it could be bone, or cartilage, but again, bone or cartilage digitally generated. The result is a feeling of their being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar.

”  ‘The uncanny’, writes Freud, ‘is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ Hovering between the ‘old and long familiar’ real and the unreal, their existence owing to digital and metaphorical narcissistic doubling, and the ambiguity of their status both as the subject and object of both the video cameras and the viewers’ gaze, are some of the many possible Freudian readings Devasher’s ‘trees’ lend themselves to.” Hemant Sareen

Untitled I from the Bone Tree series | Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 34 x 66 inches | 2014

Untitled II from the Bone Tree series | Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 34 x 66 inches | 2014

Untitled III from the Bone Tree series | Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 45 x 66 inches | 2014

‘A warehouse full of impossible monsters….’ an idea put forward by the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’. Exploring the theory of cumulative selection, Dawkins asks us to imagine a huge grid, a massive hanger with an infinite number of shelves that stretch off in all directions. Sitting on these are organisms, some of which are familiar and walk the earth; but equally possible are others, sitting in identical shelves to the left, right, top and bottom, etc. The only difference between the two is that the exact genetic sequence required to bring them into being hasn’t been decoded yet. ‘Bloodlines’ emerges from this. We begin with seven forms; parents let us say. Each ‘parent’ form is the result of a gradual construction of an intricate skeletal structure made of individual, manually placed layers of video. ‘Bloodlines’ introduces us to a family tree where each ‘parent’ breeds a set of progeny, which in turn produce offspring of their own. These forms also echo deep-sea, single celled organisms such as Radiolarians and Diatoms, which are distinguished by their unique and intricately detailed glass-like exoskeletons. These natural organisms are another example of self-organisation of pattern in nature, where patterns appear when forces are strong enough to banish uniformity, but not strong enough to induce chaos.

The raw footage for the video was video-feedback. In principle very similar to the old kaleidoscopes, video feedback is created when any ordinary hand-held camera is plugged into a TV and then made to point at itself. The optical equivalent of acoustic feedback, a loop is created between the video camera and the television screen or monitor. Like two mirrors facing each other, the image is doubled and interferes with itself. With patience and certain amount of trial and error it becomes possible to explore a vast arena of spontaneous pattern generation by varying the available controls (brightness, contrast, hue, focus, camera angle etc). The result is an amazing array of spatio-temporal patterns, mimicking those exhibited by physical, chemical, and biological systems, i.e. plant structures, cells, tree forms, bacteria, snowflakes… They are not imposed from the outside in any way and are entirely self generated within the loop.

This footage is then sliced and edited by layering and manually stacking within a video editing software to create the work.

BLOODLINES | Video and Print Installation | single channel video projected onto fabric: duration 45mins | Print: 60 x 60 inches on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper| 2009

BLOODLINES | video stills | 2009

Fossus | installation view

Fossus … something that has been dug up. What would one of the artificial forms that form part of the Bloodlines family tree look like if they existed in the real world? These forms echo deep-sea, single celled organisms such as Radiolarians and Diatoms, which are distinguished by their unique and intricately detailed porcelain-like exoskeletons. Fossus and the series of drawings that follow developed from this. Fossus is a hybrid work the base of which is white sandstone cut into the shape extracted from one of the video organisms from Bloodlines. The sculpture forms the base for a video which again derives from Bloodlines but is further layered with 12 individual drawings that gradually morph and metamorphose over a period of 12 minutes.

fossus | installation stills

Two dragonflies, side by side each ‘drawn’ with lines of video-feedback.  The forms are hybrid, deliberately layered and constructed to begin a new taxonomic structure. The two videos are related yet distinct; Doppelgänger I charts a slow process of evolution gaining in complexity. Doppelgänger II explores the idea of invariant pattern linking variable detail, i.e.  some elements  such as the dragonfly’s thorax remain constant with other structures such as wings, segmentation etc  varying in detail.  Both dragonflies go through nine transitions where in one case the form increases in complexity, while the other changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically but always with the same basic structures in place.

Arboreal is the title for both a video and a set of 20 prints. The works are related yet distinct. Both began with an exploration of L-systems or the Lindenmayer system, a formal grammar most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, introduced and developed in 1968 by the Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist Aristid Lindenmayer. L-System rules are recursive in nature which in turn leads to self-similarity and thereby fractal like forms that mimic branching patterns in the natural world.

ARBOREAL | single channel video (excerpt) | duration 16 mins | 2011

Arboreal or ‘relating to or resembling a tree.’ however is not modeled on any algorithms or programs. Via a deeply intuitive process, the a successive set of trees is constructed through the gradual manual layering of more than 700 individual layers of video, within a video editing software. By gradually increasing the recursion level the form slowly ‘grows’ and becomes more complex, engulfing the space.

ARBOREAL |set of 20 prints | 20 x24 inches each on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper | 2011

The 20 Arboreal prints are quite distinct from the video Arboreal. They are not still frames of the video but rather a window to other possibilities. One might look at the Arboreal video as a sort of archetype or ideal tree, but there are hundreds of tree forms that could also have been created using the same processes and raw footage. The Arboreal prints are those trees, each one a stage in the generation of the next. Once again these are generated by the layering of selected still frames of video-feedback footage, stacked one on top of the other. What results is a digital forest, a greenhouse of possibilities.

phytoplankton seen through a microscope.
A creature that drifts across the window on a submersible deep under the ocean.
Except that this creature is artificial, a digital construct. An intricate skeletal structure that is the result of the gradual structuring of 165 individual manually placed layers of video. Charting a journey of artificial evolution, ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ explores the generative possibilities of video feedback, the optical equivalent of acoustic feedback, which occurs when a loop exists between a video camera and a television screen or monitor. In other words, when a camera (connected to the TV) is pointed at the TV it faces an infinite number of reflections of itself, like two mirrors facing each other. The image is doubled and the image interferes with itself. With patience and certain amount of trial and error it becomes possible to explore a vast arena of spontaneous pattern generation by varying the available controls (brightness, contrast, hue, focus, camera angle etc).

Ghosts-in-the-machine (excerpt) | video duration 6 mins | 2006