Greyworld

Greyworld are a collective of London based artists who are interested in public-activated art, sculpture and interactive installations. Although often varied in their materials, their work is typically subtle and environmentally reflective, often allowing participants the opportunity to play through the work. The following descriptions are of a few selected artworks.

In 1993, Andrew Shoben founded art group Greyworld in Paris. Their goal was to create works that articulated public spaces, allowing some form of self-expression in areas of the city that people can see every day but would normally exclude and ignore. Greyworld are now based in London, with permanent works in many major cities around the world.

Their first public work of art was a series of temporary installations, Railings (1996), first created in Paris and widely copied. In each case greyworld took a set of ordinary street railings and tuned them so that when you run a stick or an umbrella along them, rather than making the 'clack-clack-clack' sound as expected, they played The Girl from Ipanema. Often created without permission, several instances of this installation have been removed.

Bridge 2, drew on ideas that Greyworld had explored in a previous work of art Playground, installed in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK. Visitors to the sculpture park stumbled across what looked like a deserted playground with faded markings for mysterious games and benches for spectators. All the elements of the installation, the floor of the playground and the accompanying benches, were sensitised with tiny sensors so that as people crossed the floor they triggered the sound of people playing a game whilst as others sitting on the bench found themselves immersed in the sound of spectators cheering and clapping. The installation is a permanent feature of the sculpture park.

Most of their early installations were sound based. In 2000, they took the Millennium Bridge which spans the Liffey River in Dublin, Ireland, and installed a bright blue carpet across its length. Embedded into the carpet were hundreds of tiny sensors that translated the motion of people crossing the bridge into a vibrant soundscape. One moment it sounded as if people were walking through crunchy snow, the next that they were sploshing through water, or walking across fallen leaves.

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