Luke Demarest

I play with peculiar properties, patterns, and procedures to produce polyphonic pictorial poems. I prioritise purposeful projects, particularly when in partnership with pleasant people from a plethora of places.

I am a visual artist and researcher based in London. I use electricity, light, language, and code to create interactive installations and computationally generated sculptures and prints. In my artist practice, I use computation to explore the non-computable, the absurd, and the idea that an individual person’s unique experiences of ‘meaning’ — their memories, events that overcome them, their loves, their beliefs — are seemingly closed to scientific inquiry. Technical, theoretical, and historical perspectives inform my work.

My work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, featured in Leonardo Journal and shortlisted for the Lumen Prize. My artist practice is currently supported by Arts Council England. I teach at the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC). I also collaborate with academic researchers to visually represent, explore, and explain complex systems that exhibit emergent behavior over time (e.g., international labour migration and modern slavery).

I previously worked as a web engineer at Rosetta Stone and as a creative technologist on projects for or funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the National Health Service (NHS), the Knight Foundation, the Embodied AudioVisual Interaction group (EAVI), Tesco, and the archive at the Royal Society of Sculptors. I also worked at the Mountain Lake Workshop as an Art Amanuensis assisting interdisciplinary projects by visual artists and composers for the John Cage Centennial.

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