How often do you collaborate with other artists, and which collaborations stand out most in your memory? Is there someone you’d still love to collaborate with?

Scores have become an increasingly important aspect of our work, and we frequently collaborate with composers. A score can enhance the work’s atmosphere, creating almost another texture. Sound is powerful; it can influence the experience of a work acutely. It’s vital that we work with a composer who has a complementary practice, someone who understands our work, otherwise there is the danger that the experience of the work becomes skewed. We’re lucky enough to have been collaborating with Max Richter since 2010; his music has opened up the emotive capacity of works like Future Self (2012) and Rain Room (2012). More recently, we’ve been working with Signe Lykke with whom we share a kindred understanding of the possibilities for co-creation. Movement is another central element of our work, particularly when it comes to interactive sculptures and installations. Our longstanding collaboration with the choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor has been invaluable here; his understanding of physicality brings out entirely new dimensions in our work and has led to many fruitful collaborations since he first commissioned our work Audience for the Royal Opera House in 2008, through to our developing the scenography for his production FAR in 2010, to our collaborative project with Studio Wayne McGregor, The Royal Ballet, and Warp Records +/- Human at The Roundhouse in 2017, and so many other interventions besides. We are excited to revisit some of these collaborations at the INFINITE BODIES exhibition at Somerset House this autumn. There is an intimate group of visual artists with whom we’ve maintained a creative dialogue over the course of many years; we don’t collaborate with one another on the creation of work but we do provide a mutually supportive sounding board for one another. We recently exhibited with Addie Wagenknecht in a duo show titled After the Machine. Pairing her remarkable paintings with our synthetic print works, we each (in very different ways) explore the effects of living in a digitally systematised world. After the Machine debuted at Athr Gallery in Jeddah and we’re excited about the prospect of it travelling. As to an unrealised dream collaboration… Wes Anderson? Brian Eno? Hildur Guðnadóttir? Billie Eilish?

What’s the core concept or driving idea that usually sparks the creation of a new piece for you?

We’re interested in the effects of technology on the human condition, all the different ways they are made manifest. Essentially, we are asking, what does it do to us, living in this way? What is the impact on our emotions, our automatic instincts, our means of connection and alienation? We see all our works as kinds of emotional prototypes, experimenting not so much with what future scenarios may look like but how, and if, they might make us feel.

What role does audience interaction play in your work? What kind of meaning or weight does it carry within the piece?

Audiences co-create the work. What begins as an idea, explored in dialogue between us, is then delivered, often via technological means by our studio, and when it’s made accessible to the public through exhibition, the audience continues the work’s authorship through their own physical participation. It’s an ongoing act of co-creation, with each other and with the machine. So… audiences carry large parts of our artistic practice.