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Bibilography
5th September 2025 - Interview with Amy Dowrick
- What encouraged you to create digital art installations, and find your niche through this form?
I aim to centre my art practice around a digital immersive experience with interactive artwork. My background in traditional media, combined with growing up and living in the digital age, motivates me to create art that merges physical and digital realms. Having completed a degree in Computational Arts, I clearly identify my interests in new media art to explore how images, code, and audience interaction shape our sense of identity, memory, and place.
- Talk me through the process behind creating an installation.
It starts with research and a question, then quick digital sketches such as browser/game-engine prototypes to test interaction. In parallel, I plan the physical “invitation” such as the furniture, screen, sensor or object that makes the first gesture to the audience. From there, it’s iterative: collect material, e.g. stories, scans, archives, build the interface, test with people, refine accessibility, and only then lock the install. For my interactive installation ‘Hear how you look, see how you sound’, I built a script that converts webcam images to audio, lets visitors “play” and edit it, then writes those edits back into the image file. The gallery version made that pipeline visible: a cluster of monitors, a single button, and the files slowly bruise over the run.
- Let’s talk about your most recent ‘Home is a dwelling path’ installation. What encouraged you to come up with the idea to explore the concept of home this way?
Home, personally, felt less like a place and more like a route, something you walk through, remix, and remember. It is fluid and ever-changing. I wanted to make a world you navigate rather than a set you view: a drifting landscape of rooms made from 3D scans, fragments of personal archives, and found material. Texts like Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory, Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, and Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby encouraged me toward small, carried stories over master narratives: a bed, a bowl, a corridor, the tiny containers for bigger histories.
- How did your own concept of home and your relationship with it personally affect your process when creating the installation?
Being Chengdu-born and London-based, I’m always translating between languages, cultures, and habits. That in-between feeling is in the work: nothing sits still, rooms are stitched and displayed in surreal, dream-like scapes, and comfort and distance happen at once. The “pillow talk” performance element came from wanting an intimate register for sharing, quiet conversations that can fold back into the digital space without turning people into pure “content.”
- You also have a digital installation titled Flickring Home – what is the concept of this in comparison to Home is a dwelling path?
Flickring Home is a browser-based artwork using Flickr’s public photo archive. A generic 3D room is textured live with images tagged “home” (and whatever tags a visitor adds), so the space constantly re-skins itself. It’s about collective memory and algorithmic chance: what surfaces, what vanishes. Home is a Dwelling Path is slower and more personal: consented recordings, scanned objects, and a physical anchor like a bunk bed to hold the encounter. One is an elastic collage of public memory; the other is a co-built, intimate map.
Both works are viewable and can be interacted with online via: https://flickring.casa/ and https://newart.city/show/home-is-a-dwelling-path
- Why is exploring the home so prominent throughout your work?
Because “home” is both personal and shared collectively, the idea of it is tender and political. It’s where care, culture, and power meet: who gets to keep archives, who gets to customise space, and what platforms do to our stories. Working on the theme of home lets me test the agency. Can we move from scrolling to building and from consuming to composing?
- Is there one piece that is most significant to you? Why?
Home is a Dwelling Path, for sure. It gathers everything I care about: participatory storytelling, 3D scanning, worldbuilding on the web, and a tactile anchor in the room. It also taught me to design for non-linear storytelling and mix the digital and physical realm, as the work gets better the more other people’s stories of home are entered.
- Is there a message that you try to convey with each installation?
That digital space can be intimate and handmade. I want visitors to feel permission to carry their own fragments into the work, and to notice how small choices, what we save, tag, or scan, quietly rewrite our histories.
- What exciting projects have you got lined up?
I’m presenting Home is a Dwelling Path at the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend as part of the Camberwell College of Art’s Computational Arts graduate exhibit. I’m also showing the same installation of the bed set up at Peckham Digital in October at Copeland Gallery, which I feel really honoured and excited about. Apart from that, with my art collectives, Cranberry Lemonade and Phreaking Collective, we are looking at workshop opportunities broadening out to Europe and putting up another exhibition in January next year in support of the Koppel Project.
Thank you! x