Staff Profile

Artist and researcher Tim Shaw works with sound, light, and communication media to create performances, installations, and site-responsive interventions. His practice spans environmental sound art, digital media, media archaeology, walking, and installation making.

Previously, Tim has developed artistic mechanisms to listen into the sound-worlds of insects, created augmented soundwalks, designed performances for high voltage devices, broadcast radio through trees, listened to network latency through time stretched bells, and extracted musical material from rocks. He frequently presents his work at festivals, in forests, caves, warehouses, up mountains, and in museums and art galleries all over the world.

Collaboration is central to his approach and he has engaged in interdisciplinary partnerships with medieval musicologists, data scientists, anthropologists, geologists, architects and astrophysicists. He has been lucky enough to make artistic work with Chris Watson, Phill Niblock, John Bowers, John Richards (Dirty Electronics), Tetsuya Umeda, Jacek Smolicki and Sébastien Piquemal (among many others).

• Tim is currently a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum.
• In 2019 Tim was selected for SHAPE (Sound and Heterogeneous Arts Platform Europe).
• Tim is the co-curator of the Walking Festival of Sound.
• Tim holds a PhD in Digital Media from Culture Lab, Newcastle University.
• He is an associate artist at Wild Musuem

His artworks, recordings and writings have been featured in The Guardian, Arte Tracks, Neural, BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM, We Make Money Not Art, Touch Radio, The British Music Collection, The Field Recording Show, Alphr, Its Nice That, SHAPE and The Space.

• Articles

  • Richards J, Shaw T. Improvisation through Performance-installation. Organised Sound 2022, 27(2), 144-155.
  • Hudson M, Shaw T. Dead Logics and Worlds: Sound art and sonorous objects. Organised Sound 2015, 20(2), 263-272.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Bowers J, Richards J, Shaw T, Frize J, Freeth B, Topley S, Spowage N, Jones S, Patel A, Li R, Edmondes W. One Knob To Rule Them All: Reductionist Interfaces for Expansionist Research. In: New Interfaces For Musical Expression. 2016, Brisbane, Australia.
  • Bowers J, Bowen S, Shaw T. Many Makings: Entangling Publics, Participation and Things in a Complex Collaborative Context. In: ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. 2016, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia: ACM.
  • Shaw T, Bowen S, Bowers J. Unfoldings: Multiple Explorations of Sound and Space. In: New Interfaces For Musical Expression. 2016, Brisbane, Australia.
  • Shaw T, Bowers J. Public Making: Artistic Strategies for Working with Museum Collections, Technologies and Publics. In: International Symposium on Electronic Art. 2015, Vancouver, Canada: ISEA.
  • Arrigoni G, Schofield T, Shaw T, Bowers J. Prototyping Heritage: Collections, Materials and Emerging Approaches to Engagement. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Connected Communities Heritage Network Symposium. 2015, Sheffield: Heritage Network project.
  • Shaw T, Piquemal S, Bowers J. Fields: An Exploration into the use of Mobile Devices as a Medium for Sound Diffusion. In: NIME 2015: Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. 2015, Baton Rouge, LA: The School of Music and the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT), Louisiana State University.
  • Bowers J, Shaw T. Reappropriating Museum Collections: Performing Geology Specimens and Meterology Data as New Instruments for Musical Expression. In: New Interfaces For Musical Expression. 2014, London.