Every day on his way to art school, Matt Pyke listened to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 on his discman. The future classic of electronica was reportedly recorded on cassette over a period of six years, beginning when Aphex Twin (Richard David James) was 14 years old. Not only was Pyke drawn to the beat beneath the ambient techno, but also the process behind its creation. Aphex Twin produced it in his bedroom.
“That was a total sort of punk, bedroom DIY, build-your-own-synthesiser [approach],” Pyke explains before mentioning the illegal raves Aphex Twin hosted in Cornwall, which along with the album, “led [him] onto the Artificial Intelligence compilation and Warp Records.”
A DIY ethos, Warp Records and music more broadly all influenced Pyke, the founder of art and design collective Universal Everything (UE). This year UE celebrates its 20th anniversary with Beings, a major retrospective at ACMI. Growing up, Pyke tried to “figure out design” while his brother, composer Simon Pyke, experimented with making music on a ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit home computer that Aphex Twin had also used in his early days.
After studying botanical and technical illustration, then design, in London, Pyke moved to Sheffield to work at The Designer’s Republic (TDR). The studio made album covers for Warp Records artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre and LFO, as well as covers for games such as Wipeout (1995) and Grand Theft Auto (1997). Known for their anti-establishment aesthetics, TDR subverted the style of corporate brands with an ironic street-culture sensibility and a bright playfulness seen in UE’s work today.
At TDR, Pyke developed an interest in motion graphics and sound, exploring with then-new software like After Effects. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, motion graphics were relatively new, and designers shared their experiments on DVD reels containing short packages of motion graphics, animation and VFX curated and distributed by companies like onedotzero in the UK, Stash in the US and Gas in Japan. A global network of creatives emerged, bolstered by in-person events such as RESFest and onedotzero’s adventures in motion, which melded graphic design, interactive experiences, lectures and performances. They were lively festivals where a new, distributed class of creatives came together to test new digital techniques and share expertise.
“What excited me was the possibility for collaboration and working in a very cross-disciplinary way,” says Shane Walter, a designer and theatre producer who helped establish onedotzero as a champion of new media collectives and artworks. “I always thought it was really interesting if you put an architect, an animator and a musician in the room – what would come out the other side?”
Much of this creative explosion was propelled by the internet, consumer cameras and computer software getting faster, better and cheaper – plus the mostly 20-somethings who embraced the tipping point between analogue and digital technologies and aesthetics.
“Rather than using [new digital tools] to make the same films, we thought it was a nice idea to see how these tools could make different moving images,” Walter says.
An example of the burgeoning aesthetic used by Universal Everything early in their career for an MTV global rebrand. Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
Around this time, Stuart Brown was starting out at the British Film Institute (BFI). Rather than the auteur-driven film seasons the BFI was known for, Brown’s programming featured interactive installations, music acts and videos, anime features, street culture documentaries, and the animation and motion graphics packages that Hi-Res! (which started RESFest) and onedotzero were producing, which featured Pyke’s early experiments with motion graphics.
“It was vibing on the culture. Hip hop, electronic music and anime were all part of it,” Brown, who is now Head of Programming and Distribution at the BFI, recalls. Digital technology had arrived, and the scene was “using it, testing it and evolving the language and possibilities of it.”
The music and street culture scene, and the growing technical capabilities, contributed to Pyke establishing Universal Everything in 2004. Despite the collective’s current make-up and name, it began much like Aphex Twin – a single artist working alone.
“I was in the attic of our house in Sheffield. It was very much me on my own, but I had ambitions to do many things. I just thought, 'What is the biggest word possible that could describe the space that our studio exists in?' and that's where Universal Everything came from.”
It also came from that DIY ethos. “I had been very prolific making work with these newfound digital tools, which came along with faster internet where we could get videos uploaded quickly and get stuff out there,” Pyke says.
Brown agrees, pointing to how organisations like onedotzero gave young designers the confidence to create and not wait for support from a gallery or bigger studio. “They were saying, ‘Look, you can get these mini DV cameras now and make stuff.’ They were predicting how the internet would become a place to find your audience. You didn’t need the structures that controlled the culture.”
The beginnings of Web 2.0 were taking shape in 2004. The first incarnation of Facebook was launched, as was Gmail and World of Warcraft. YouTube came a year later. For Pyke, it “was all about newsgroups and forums”, which evolved from swapping DVDs.
“Things went viral in a chat room context. Our work could reach people from any corner of the world, and it also meant that we could work with people from any corner of the world,” he explains.
This was partly a necessity. In Sheffield, far from the design epicentres of London and New York, Pyke was an outlier – but he had the internet and could work with a programmer in Japan or product designer in America. “It became this natural remote network of collaborators ever since.”
Today, Universal Everything has six core members, and a team of over 50 collaborators around the world.
'Fuzzyman' visuals for Coldplay / Charlie Brown / X-Factor demonstrating the cross-over with motion-image work and music visuals. Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
Local to global
On a family trip to Barcelona in the mid-2000s, Pyke stopped into a graphic design gallery. They had seen his work and asked if he wanted to do a show. The gallery had a large format printer for creating huge artworks, which he used to create a “printed mash-up of all the motion and graphic work [he’d] done so far”, which became a long thin frieze around their gallery (pictured below).
Someone at Nokia saw the work and invited UE to create video art for a new flagship store in London. UE’s first 360-degree video wall appeared at Nokia’s store in Regent Street in 2008.
“That’s kind of how it started. We became known as this video-wall studio. We were getting more and more commissions as the industry of large-format screens for buildings and interiors and museums grew,” Pyke says.
But it wasn’t just large-format screen work UE was producing, but typography, logos, motion graphics, apps, prototypes and artworks. After Nokia came a worldwide rebrand of MTV in 2009. Later AOL, Intel, Apple, the London Olympics and famously, Hyundai, who have commissioned building-scale works from Universal Everything for public spaces across Seoul and Indonesia.
In the early to mid-2000s, brands wanted to capitalise on the frenetic energy of the culture and courted creatives who expressed a new digital-led aesthetic. Events, activations and sponsorships were a focal point for brands searching to reach consumers outside traditional advertising avenues. For Universal Everything, partnering with brands who supported their aesthetic and artistic sensibilities gave them the freedom to operate outside a traditional studio structure and only accept work that appealed to them.
“We never had the ambition to grow a huge studio and have to take on a load of crap work just to keep everyone paid,” Pyke explains. “I'd much rather that every single project we do we're super proud to show, and there's no secret corporate stuff to bankroll the fun stuff.”
This relates to UE’s nomadic working style, which Pyke likens to a band. With a small core team, they can outsource skills to collaborators. With staffing and overhead costs like rent down, there’s scope to experiment and create prototypes. Brands can help further develop prototypes through commissions. You can see the technical and aesthetic evolution of UE’s MTV ‘mister furry’ ident (2009) in the ‘fuzzyman’ tour visuals for Coldplay (2010); their self-initiated, PRIX Ars Electronica award-winning artwork, Walking City (2014); and Hyundai commissions Running Man (2015) and Run Forever (2021).
Walking City (2014) by Universal Everything. Video via their YouTube channel.
“We were just making work,” Pyke says. “Some of it was self-initiated, some of it was client collaborations but to me there’s not that much difference.”
This reflects the independence that Shane Walter hoped to cultivate at onedotzero. “It was always encouraging [artists] to do their personal work as opposed to being commissioned to do work, but not necessarily differentiating the outcome but differentiating the input,” he says.
Brown saw this not just with UE, but other artists and filmmakers who screened their work at BFI and onedotzero events. “They were happy to do work with big brands whilst also continuing their practice or even using the commercial research and development (R&D) for making promos or music videos or tour visuals for acts like Kanye.”
Universal Everything x Hyundai Run Forever (2021). Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
“Computational clay”
“I wanted to play really trashy rave music because it was a museum,” Aphex Twin told journalist and curator Heiko Hoffman.
In 2001, the electronic-music pioneer played a gig at the V&A surrounded by glass sculptures. Another time, he played at the hallowed museum for a Warp Records party. The V&A was executing its ‘FuturePlan’, which according to former V&A Curator of Digital and Deputy Head of Contemporary Programmes Louise Shannon, “was about shifting what a national institution could be”.
This was done through a small department called Contemporary Programs, which was headed by Susan McCormack. Working outside the museum’s core collection, curators were permitted to be experimental and commission or exhibit new works to activate the museum. One of the main ways Contemporary Programs did this was through V&A Lates, which featured after-hours access, bars, art and activities.
“It was a time when you were trying to bring that cultural shift into the museum – to bring in a sense of a festival,” Shannon explains.
Though supported by senior staff, there was inevitably some in the organisation who saw cultural institutions as needing to uphold the expectation of being scholarly, rarefied spaces. It was the same for Brown at the BFI.
“You’re using an institutional context and framework to connect to a culture that was very alien to the people who were in charge,” Brown says. “There was a transgressive aspect to it.”
Brown and Shannon both worked with onedotzero to invite that festival feeling and connect with the culture. While Onedotzero screened Universal Everything’s work in both venues, they also collaborated with United Visual Artists (UVA). Part of Contemporary Programs’ remit was to bring underutilised areas of the museum into a different light. One area was the garden, which welcomes visitors into the museum’s ornate entrance. In 2005, UVA staged Monolith, a three-metre-high single block of LEDs that reacted with sound and light as people approached.
In 2006, onedotzero co-programmed a V&A Late that featured spinning, vertical animations by UE, which went on to be developed into visuals for George Michael’s 25 Live world tour (2006-07). The same year another UVA sculpture appeared in the courtyard, Volume, a field of 48 luminous, sound-emitting columns that responded to people’s movement. Shannon remembers that after the success of the Lates Program and Volume, “something had shifted” in the attitudes of the museum directors. Large-scale digital artworks were delighting audiences and bringing in new ones.
Footage of George Michael performing in front of Universal Everything's work. Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
This was further solidified in late 2009, when UE’s Forever opened in the V&A forecourt. Forever was a generative digital sculpture that explored “impermanence and ephemeral notions of time” by riffing on the building’s architecture and the historic objects inside.
“Seeing Matt Pyke’s collaborative process – through sound, though coding, through the visuals – was really a joy,” Shannon says. “My mind was blown that he was online in Sheffield, fully leading the way.”
These events acted as “reassuring anchors for the museum” to openDecode: Digital Design Sensations in 2009. Curated by Shannon and Walter, Decode was one of the first major exhibitions to feature all digital artworks and included collectives like rAndom International, Troika and Fabrica and artists such as Memo Akten, Golan Levin and Jason Burges.
Another way Shannon sold it to the higher-ups was by framing code as “computational clay”, which could naturally sit beside the V&A’s famed ceramics collection and connect new media art to traditional design practices. “We were like, this is about code as a design process.”
That’s not to say it was the same as displaying ceramics. Many of the works were experimental and interactive. By bringing digital works into galleries, artists and collectives were operating outside their comfort zone. About 100,000 people attended Decode and such high volume put a lot of pressure on prototypes that had only been used in a lab or studio. Institutional frameworks meant that curators and engineers could support experimental works throughout an exhibition run, with teams working behind the scenes to keep them functioning. That didn’t always work, with some pieces having to be de-installed despite their best efforts.
The reality is that most traditional museums don’t have the technical infrastructure or expertise to support a large volume of digital artworks. That could be why, though Decode was a watershed moment, it didn’t necessarily lead to a huge increase in tech-heavy, new media shows over the next decade.
Forever at the V&A, 2009. Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
One gallery that is equipped to present digital works is La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, which was purpose-built in 2010. Two years after Decode, Universal Everything took 12 prototypes and updated artworks out of the attic for their first solo gallery show, Super-Computer Romantics. According to Pyke, “that completely re-contextualised the work we were doing” and led to other “museums and galleries and collectors… getting in touch”.
UE’s works have since been shown as part of group exhibitions and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Borusan Contemporary (Istanbul) and 180 Studios (London).
“It was never a conscious effort to bang down the doors of galleries in Mayfair. It was just keep making the work and eventually someone will spot it – and that’s what happened,” Pyke says.
Outside the frame
One place you’ll spot UE’s work is Korea. In an interview with Dazed in 2011 about Super-Computer Romantics, Pyke was asked what next. “More screens on more surfaces… As screen technologies develop - driven by the forces of advertising - there will be more sizes and contexts to fill with content. From LED fabric to projecting onto the moon.”
Superconsumers (2019) may not be the moon, but it’s a respectable 30 metres high. An update on UE’s walking figure, it features consumer textures like basketballs, puffer jackets and jewllery. It was commissioned by Hyundai to wrap around The Hyundai department store in Seoul. UE’s creative partnership with Hyundai, stretching back to 2010, perfectly demonstrates the intersection of art and commerce, but also the ethos of that early-2000s scene. Part of what Walter was doing at onedotzero was trying to create an ecosystem between museums, commercial operators and industry.
A view of Superconsumers in Seoul, South Korea. Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
“I was constantly looking for new avenues and new places to show work, I was trying to push it wider and bigger – not just be underground,” Walter remembers. Even before putting new media art in museums, Walter took onedotzero to over 150 countries to prove “that great work can be made anywhere”. Pyke’s practice, plugged in from Sheffield, represented exactly that. “He’s almost the embodiment of a lot of things that we talked about – working as a collective, collaboratively, cross-disciplinary, using future tools and techniques.”
For Pyke, Korea is a natural canvas for future tools and techniques. Super-advanced and savvy with technology, the country is covered in video walls. UE has taken advantage of this, exhibiting 10 works in galleries, train stations and hotels. The other factor is the universality of UE’s work – their anthropomorphic work blends the primal with the technological. Pyke describes “watching life emerge” in UE’s work as “somehow tapping into this ancient feeling in everybody”.
For Brown, operating on multiple levels defines UE’s work. “Young kids stare because it's so absorbing on a human level but then you'll have genius special effects guys trying to work out the very specialist technologies they've used.”
But there’s a playfulness to UE’s work that resists the screens it's displayed on or the tech that powers it. Naturally colourful and bright, it has an organic texture and humanity – whether through movement and choreography, animal forms and features, anthropomorphism or making shapes human by giving them eyes. UE call this soulful technology.
“There’s something interesting about using soulfulness, cuteness, life, as a way of connecting with an audience and creating empathy,” says Pyke.
One of Universal Everything's biggest canvases, the Sydney Opera House, where they projected a living mural. Video via UE's Vimeo channel.
Beings at ACMI contends that at the heart of UE’s work is imagination. It all begins with a single hand-drawn line. Despite the specialist skills in the broader UE collective, Pyke starts each artwork with imagination and a sketch. It goes back to his early days studying botanical and industrial illustration at art school, listening to Aphex Twin.
Pyke may not have projected onto the moon yet but dreaming big has seen him push the boundaries of technology and touch millions of people around the world with his imagination, from art galleries and ads to cityscapes, apps and festivals. When Aphex Twin sung “We are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams”, you know that Pyke was listening.
– Matt Millkan, Editorial, Interpretation and Publications Manager, ACMI
Listen to the full interview
Keri Elmsly (ACMI's Executive Director of Programming) caught up with Matt Pyke to reflect on the collective's roots and key projects, and to find out where UE are heading next.
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What is Universal Everything? examines 24 of the studio’s most exciting projects, and includes sketches, essays, speculations and detailed listings of the studio’s numerous sources of inspiration. Every cover is unique.
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