Before, the Here and After is an installation that is constantly evolving in both its physical and digital form. The structure that is constantly changing, being collected and renewed as we forage the shoreline for discarding fishing waste. The projected part is a generative work, a program that runs, constantly renewing its form. When we discovered the reality of ghost nets we instantly identified the striking resemblance of digital generative networks and the destruction of life at sea. The digital networks produce elements that have a life and a death, pre determined by our control of the code. The nets also have a cyclical life, they attract and detract life, destroying and creating at the same time, relying on these cycles in order to exist.

reviewed: "For the Bexhill After Dark Festival, ZEROH presented the evolving installation Before, the Here and After, a striking piece suspended within the cavernous void of Beulah Baptist Church in Bexhill-on-Sea. This work, a collaboration between artists ZEROH and the sound duo Nicola and Ian Stick In The Wheel, occupies a space between the digital and the organic, an ever-changing entity created through noise maps and complex algorithms. At its core, it represents a life force that refuses to remain static, perpetually morphing and regenerating.

  
Before, the Here and After is deeply embedded in the theme of environmental collapse, specifically referencing the ubiquitous and destructive phenomenon of 'ghost nets'. These discarded remnants of industrial fishing—often abandoned by the sea—form vast, tangled structures that pose an ongoing threat to marine life. Made from synthetic fibres, these nets, after being abandoned, drift across the ocean, silently ensnaring sea creatures, only to sink once weighted down by their catch. In a grim cycle, once the prey decomposes, the nets resurface, repeating their deadly task. The visual work reflects this cyclical violence, with its digital entity emulating the autonomous, almost organic processes of these nets: a continuous evolution driven by systems of birth, death, and decay.

  
The installation's conceptual depth lies in its parallels to the ghost nets themselves—both digital and physical constructs driven by autonomous systems, reliant on perpetual cycles of life and dissolution. Through its evolving nature, the piece evokes a sense of urgency, a reflection on both human impact and the natural world's struggle for survival. The accompanying soundscape, composed by Nicola and Ian Stick In The Wheel, amplifies this sense of dissolution, with its haunting tones creating a sonic environment that mirrors the work's digital entity: an unsettling, omnipresent force that refuses to be ignored.”

  
The piece succeeds in its exploration of the tension between creation and destruction, emphasising how humanity’s actions—so often unseen and forgotten—continue to ripple through the environment, often with catastrophic consequences."

Before, the Here and After

Video produced for the track 'Ruins' by the band Stick in The Wheel. Through this artform we can deliver a comment about our broken world by way of accompanying a message from 10 Centuries ago, which serves to highlight the cyclical nature of the abject horrors humans inflict on one another.

  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEVaQugIUO4

Ruins

Following on from the success of our 2022 ‘Caught a Curiosity’ project for Hastings Storytelling Festival we were commissioned to devise a follow up project for the 2023 edition focusing specifically on the community in Broomgrove, an estate and ward of Hastings to the north of the town which experiences very little engagement with the wider community and high levels of unemployment.

The Broomgrove Eclipse was a multi-strand project which built momentum toward an interactive storytelling event featuring secret messages and symbols hidden around the estate, a lit up pylon and a display of the Eclipse on a 5m LED screen in the community centre car park.

As a further development of our Curious Kids Festival Moth Trap project we held a series of workshops with community youth projects, In2Play and Motivate, and engaged their young people in the process of patterning Moth wings in order to become part of ‘The Broomgrove Eclipse’ (Eclipse being the collective name for a group of Moths) to be presented, large scale, on the weekend of the Festival. The young people were given moth wing templates which featured information on the species and clues as to how they are patterned in nature and we very much encouraged pattern development through colour and collage so those taking part created a moth distinguishable as their own and identifiable in the Eclipse.

To create legacy for the project we worked with developer Kester Sheridan for the Eclipse to be an interactive Augmented Reality (AR) experience available as a web AR app at the end of the project. We also commissioned Psychogeography author Gareth E. Rees, with whom we had previously worked with on our MOTHer project in 2018, to write a narrative taking in some of the history of the area and a how a Power Station, which dominated the landscape and provided jobs to the local community, decommissioned in 1997, brought about a new type of Moth which would help in global pollination efforts with the decline of Bees due to climate change and pollution.

We wanted to install a sense of pride and wonder in the young people of Broomgrove giving a focused experience unique to them and the narrative of their community while highlighting conversations around climate change and human influence. On the night of the Broomgrove Eclipse professional storyteller Amelia Armande guided the young people to various locations around the estate revealing elements of the story, artwork and interventions and bringing the project to life. The symbols mentioned in the narrative were applied to walls and fencing with UV paint and all those on the trail were given UV light keyrings so they could individually find and explore the story elements. On site there was a 5m LED screen which featured the Eclipse made from the results of the Moths created during the workshops and a photobooth set up, developed by Kester Sheridan, which allowed attendees to have their photos taken and applied to a Moth UV map and added to the Eclipse there and then. By the end of the evening there were 123 Moths in the Eclipse.

One significant quote from the evening was the fact that kids from all over the normally divided estate came together without any trouble and experienced something that they would hopefully remember for a long time to come.

Cllr Andy Batsford, lead councillor for Health and Culture, said: "It was great to see so many of the local community and people from the wider town come together to enjoy this immersive multimedia experience, despite the weather! I really enjoyed seeing the creative unique moth patterns projected onto the huge screen which were crafted by local children, this is all part of using culture, music and art to really energise Broomgrove."

  

Broomgrove Eclipse

STICK IN THE WHEEL – LIVE 2023 Early Summer 2023 saw us work with electronic folk band Stick in the Wheel on two live performances under specific sets of circumstances. The first performance at Kings Place, London was a 360 audio event as part of the venues ‘Sound Unwrapped’ series of concerts, presented as a special audio experience utilising d&b audiotechnik’s surround sound Soundscape system. The second performance took place at Brighton Dome as part of Brighton Festival 2023\. In both cases we presented visuals which interacted with the audio and the band in subtle yet powerful ways. We produced a specific set of visuals which created hypnotic moments of immersion, utilizing Shark Tooth gauze which appears both transparent and opaque depending on whether it is front or back lit. We set the gauze in front of the band to create a presentaion which appeared immersive and ethereal, enveloping the the band in our film and animation work. Spinning geometric shapes appeared to cage vocalist Nicola Kearey with trees growing from her songbook, drone footage highlighted the ruins brought about by war in Ukraine, turbulent and erratic storm blown graphics matched the acid line arpeggios and energy of ‘Devils Nag’, a reinterpreted 17th Century Morris Dance melody.

Stick In The Wheel_Live_Projections

In October 2022 we were commissioned by Hastings long running Storytelling Festival to produce a digital spectacle for their Saturday evening programme, to follow on from a screening of the popular childrens film ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and a Q&A with author Cressida Cowell. Initial suggestions from the festival included projection mapping in some capacity on to buildings in Hastings town centre but we wanted to produce something away from the seafront, where so much of Hastings cultural activity takes place, and engage a wider audience who wouldn’t necessarily attend the festivals events. We devised an idea around the notion of a curiosity in transit, creating a travelling spectacle to visit the local communities so often neglected by the towns cultural offerings and present something that would potentially trigger conversation and perhaps storytelling from those who witnessed it. The ‘curiosity’ was designed as a strange creature which, having been washed ashore, was now being transported to an undisclosed facility in order to undergo a series of tests to determine what the creature actually was and where it may have come from. The vehicle transporting the ‘curiosity’ had to make several stops on route as the creature had not traveled before and would require regular breaks in order to maintain calm. Using a three sided LED advertising van we created the illusion of a tank of illuminated dense liquid which contained the creature. The ‘curiosity’ started as an amoeba shape shifting over time to become a complex other worldly presence which, occasionally, appeared to acknowledge the audience. On arrival at the pre-publicised locations the van was cordoned off with traffic cones and hazard tape and once an audience had gathered the ‘shutters’, on the van, would rise. At several locations we had a waiting audience, sat on deck chairs, no-one knowing quite what to expect. As the ‘curiosity’ became more active the audience chased it from one side of the van to the other trying to catch a look at it mutating.

Caught a Curiosity

Artist and Filmmaker Andrew Kötting commissioned ZEROH along with 3 other artists to present new work in St.Clements Church in Old Romney as part of the annual Art in Romney Marsh series of exhibitions. ZEROH created a moth from edge lit perspex featuring an etched pattern which fluctuated in luminescence and tone with the changing light that came in through the main window in the church. St.Clements is the resting place of Artist and Film Director Derek Jarman. Special thanks to Iberian Lighting, Hastings.

Romney Moth

Ghost like apparitions of heavily patterned moths camouflaged for an urban setting invade Hastings and St.Leonards. These transient imprints of nature clothed in geometry lay at rest across the towns architecture. The Hastings Moths Project is a bold statement on the state of metamorphosis the historic town finds itself in at this time. The town wide installation is part of the 'Art in Spaces' scheme initiated by Hastings Borough Council with funding from the Arts Council England.

Hastings Moths

We took over a shop window on the seafront in St.Leonards on Sea in East Sussex Feb - May 2023 and did various projections some illusionary, some projection mapping some straight projections.

  

Shop Not Shop

After an 8 month residency creatively managing and directing a 'Digital Arts Hub' in Hastings we ended the tenure by holding an exhibition of the work produced during that time. The exhibition featured 300 3D print portraits of members of the public who came into the hub for a Lidar scan portrait, some life size augmented reality portraits, 3 lidar scan collages and video works featuring the portraits. The exhibition ran for a week and on the closing night we invited all those who had been scanned to come and collect their 3D printed portraits. During the courser of the project each subject was given a unique QR code so they could access there AR 3D portrait online.

  

People of Hastings

'WaveLength' is the second project for us in Bottle Alley, along Hastings seafront, and what started as a temporary commission from the arts festival 'Coastal Currents' in September 2017 and is now a permanent fixture due to the overwhelmingly positive public response. The first project 'Point of Decay' highlighted the decline of the walkway after years of neglect using temporary bio degradable paste ups we curated an outdoor gallery along the 500 meter expance, 'WaveLength' comes after the repairs were done and serves as a celebration of the space and an attempt to re-establish Bottle Alley as a safe space of social recreational activity using the installation and a series of events. The 113 columns along the 500 m passage were painted to create two gradients east west (Hastings to St. Leonards) and west east (St. Leonards to Hastings) using a palette of 110 colours. The project is an exploration of rhythm and colour in a unique space, referencing the environment in which it sits. 

  
In 2023 the project was revived due to public demand after the installation was 'whited-out' by the local council after graffiti too over the space during lockdown in 2020-2021\. We re-imagined the project as an experiement in collective ownership of a public artwork and have a list of over 300 volunteers who help us maintain the work.

Wavelength

Commissioned for Coastal Currents 2018, ‘MOTHer’ was a narrative based project housed in an Augmented Reality app featuring real world components and interventions. It acted as an origin story for The Hastings Moth Project, 2010, taking influence from folklore and the notion of myth-making in the era of ‘Fake News’. It featured a specially commissioned narrative entitled ‘It Came From The Sea’, written by Hastings based author and Unoffical Britian founder/ editor Gareth E Rees, which imagined an alternate reality where the Moths landed on the walls of Hastings and St.Leonards from a very different source but with the same intentions. We asked Gareth to create a narrative that touched on invasion b-movies, social paranoia and community in the time of Brexit. We worked with award winning 3D artist/ modeler Gocken Yuksek whose models have featured on NetFlix’s Black Mirror to create the characters for the AR. The story is told as recounted memories by singer and musician Jessica Banks, in her first role as voice over artist. It was all held together inside an app developed for us by Alister Clarkson from Shape of Sound. The wider story featured further collaborations with actor/ playwrite John Knowles, ethical taxidermist Jazmine Miles-Long and Sea Shanty writer/ singer Bob Tipler.

MOTHer

“Bottle Alley, Hastings is one of those unique spaces that has always captured our imaginations. It’s unrelenting 440meters of concrete is hard and linear, framing the sea on one side so the experience of walking/ promenading is elevated out of being a dreary underground passage cut through, to one of a beach side gallery.” POINT OF DECAY was an outdoor subterranean street art installation of wheat paste post ups, devised and curated by us, works printed on super thin copy paper covering the 112 columns over half a kilometer long installation. Bottle Alley’s decline over the last decade or so has reached the point where something has to be done in order to save this unique feature, on Hastings seafront, from being lost forever. Finances were put in place to treat and repair the very worst of the decay in early 2016 allowing us the unique opportunity to present an installation of local artists in the space, a first in Bottle Alley’s 80 year history. We commissioned 16 local artists to create original artwork for the columns that line the alleyway, in response to and utilising the crumbling and blown nature of the architecture, creating second skins for the supports, that embrace the state Bottle Alley finds itself in. The artworks, attached using wheat paste, were from a wide ranging group of artists – printmakers, photographers, sculptors, painters and interventionists – some of whom presented their work as print for the very first time. The artworks are wrapped around all four sides of the columns therefore giving 4 view points of all the artwork, including from the beach. The installation remained in place for as long as possible allowing environmental factors and the general public to aid its decay. The opening event, attended by over 1,500 people over the course of 2 hours, featured The Rayner Hess Trio playing a selection of classical pieces as the sunset in the bastion nearest the pier, which had just opened.

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