Keith Armstrong
Keith Armstrong
Keith Armstrong is an experimental artist deeply motivated by issues of social and ecological justice. His participatory and engaged practices encourage audiences to understand, anticipate and imagine collective pathways towards a sustainable future. For more than twenty-three years, he has specialised in collaborative experimental practices with an emphasis on innovative performance forms, site-specific electronic arts, networked interactive installations, alternative interfaces, art-science collaborations, and socially and ecologically engaged practices.
Keith’s research asks how knowledge drawn from scientific and philosophical ecologies can help us better invent and guide experimental art forms, based on the understanding that arts professionals are powerful agents of change, provocateurs and social catalysts. Through inventing radical research methodologies and processes, he has led and created more than sixty major artworks and process-based projects, widely presented across Australia and internationally, supported by numerous grants from both the public and private sectors.
He was the commissioned artist responsible for installing the large-scale collaborative work Uramat Mugas, exhibited at the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10), Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane. In 2022 he presented his video work Common Thread in the exhibition Possibles at ISEA 2022 (27th International Symposium on Electronic Art), Barcelona, Spain, and also at V2 Lab (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and the Novtec Festival (Lima, Peru). During 2023–2025 he is presenting a touring exhibition of a large-scale social artwork, Carbon_Dating, which fosters a “community of care” around the maintenance of native grasses and meadows. In 2024 he presented Analog Intelligence at ISEA 2024 (Everywhen), Brisbane, and began a new long-term project titled Forest Art Intelligence (FAI), which seeks to integrate a series of artworks that support plants within a rejuvenating forest, with the capacity to sustain the multiple intelligences of a resurgent forest ecology. This was supported in 2024 by his second ANAT Synapse residency fellowship (he previously received this prestigious residency in 2012). As part of this project, he also presented the immersive multi-screen work Translucent Kinship for ANAT Synapse/Reciprocity 2025. In 2025 he returned to South Africa to collaboratively create the works Radiant Walls (Un-learn Re-Learn) and What Remains Through Time (Slowness and Stillness).
He currently resides in Brisbane (Australia).
A full history of his work can be viewed at www.embodiedmedia.com.
Work in the collection: “Common Thread” 2022
Back "Fil comú" 2022
Common Thread is an audiovisual installation presented in the curated and peer-reviewed exhibition ‘Possibles’ as part of ISEA 2022 (27th International Symposium of Electronic Art). The artwork presents slow and mysterious steps through forest landscapes composed solely of silver-grey points and lines; while the affected sounds of these forests blend with the distant voices of countless species. Within these strange landscapes, indistinct 3D forms appear and disappear enigmatically, collectively evoking richly mysterious, unknowable and extraordinary complexities.