Strange Pill is audio visual artist duo Ben Hardy and Zahara Muñoz-Vicens, known for their experimentation with music and interactive digital collages. Strange Pill have been merging filmed live performance cutups, locations, loops, touch-screens, holograms, projections and video art since 2010.

This experimentation process started with their psychedelic band, The Nyco Project. The group set out to explore new media and alternative ways of experiencing raw music in a digital landscape; unveiling the visual narrative that is absent in an audio recording. In 2013 they received Arts Council Funding and published their first independent EP under The Nyco Project as an interactive app titled The New Machine – the first release of a series of three video-collage music pieces presented as digital moving paintings, which the audience can take apart and reconstruct with touchscreens.

Over the last eight years, Strange Pill have worked in collaboration with a diverse community of artists, programmers and organisations as part of their ongoing Musicjelly concept, where audiences are invited to enter the creative process and become audio-visual composers. Beginning in 2011, the duo trailed around London and beyond with mobile recording devices, documenting thousands of live performance moments to build the Audio Visual Music Machine, a nonlinear ever-evolving piece which has billions of possible permutations. In 2015, they transformed a warehouse in pre-demolition limbo into a holographic filming studio, and created the interactive holographic installation, Astral Music Projections.

Commissioned by the Barbican Centre in 2015, Strange Pill also created an interactive installation with the The New York Philharmonic, exploring Mozart and Beethoven through audio visual deconstruction, which was later turned into an online app.

www.strangepill.co.uk
@strangepill_artists