Interview: Haroon Mirza on Ambiguity and the Algorithmic Divine

Pakistani-British artist Haroon Mirza has long been preoccupied with the unseen and the unheard—the overlooked energies, signals and codes that shape our perceptions of the world. Known for building self-sustaining systems that generate sound and light, his work exists in a state of restless translation: data becomes vibration, so-called silence becomes rhythm, belief becomes circuitry. For In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation, a major exhibition at Southend-on-Sea’s Focal Point Gallery in collaboration with the Roberts Institute of Art, Mirza presents a newly commissioned audio installation and performance that reimagines an earlier work of his from 2013. On this occasion, in conversation with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, the artist reflects on how language fractures and reforms across generations and why ambiguity is essential for making good art.

Keshav Anand: The exhibition In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation explores how meaning shifts across contexts. How does your own practice wrestle with the idea of translation, whether across media, cultures, or time?

Haroon Mirza: With language, we are constantly engaged in two types of translation. The first is semantic—an unstable process, since words can carry multiple meanings, and sentences even more so. A misunderstanding is still a form of understanding, albeit an incorrect one. The second type is physical: the transmission of sound (spoken word) or graphic symbols (syntax) from sender to receiver.

Beyond this, we must also navigate shifting language itself. Slang and dialects evolve constantly—what was hot or cool in the ’70s became wicked in my childhood, then sick in my adulthood. Now my kids say lit, sigma, or skibidi (which, apart from Skibidi Toilet, means nothing at all). How do we translate that?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, implying that we decode images into language. Art historians, forensic scientists, and archaeologists do this deliberately, but most of us process visuals instinctively, without conscious translation. For me, translation is distinct from mere codification and decoding. The former is rich with discrepancies—what’s lost or gained—while the latter is computational, requiring decipherment before translation can even begin.

As an artist, I translate the world around me: our contemporary condition, shaped by politics and technology, as well as the historical artefacts that shaped it. It’s the gaps and transformations in translation that make art-making both fascinating and new.

KA: Building on this, how do you think about the role of ambiguity or multiplicity of meaning in your work?

HM: Art is most compelling to me when it’s ambiguous, challenging, and complex. If I already know exactly what I’m doing while working, I’m not meeting those criteria. The longer it takes me—or anyone else—to process, decipher, and translate the work into language, the more successful it feels.

KA: Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet transforms silent electrical signals into sung human voices. What first drew you to the idea of translating data into choral performance?

HM: Focal Point Gallery and the Roberts Institute of Art desired sound in their exhibition. We had a good discussion around Tim Ingold’s text, On Not Knowing and Paying Attention: How to Walk in a Possible World, in which the author draws a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. It chimed well with my meditations on how truth relates to belief. This line of thinking took me back to Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO (2013) and how the title—a description of the objects in the installation: an Adam-branded monitor speaker, an Eve-branded monitor speaker, other speakers, and an LED device known as a UFO—creates a weird alternative narrative to the biblical creationist story.

I composed the piece in 2013 by connecting a string of eight programmed LEDs to speakers. After hearing what that sounded like and living with the composition for several years, humming it to myself in my head, like a self-imposed earworm, I’ve imagined it being sung by a choral octet for a long time.

KA: So this new commission builds on a piece you made in 2013. How has your thinking around the original work evolved in the twelve years since?

HM: I didn’t give much weight to the title twelve years ago, despite the loaded reference. It’s taken me over a decade to feel fractionally equipped to explore these theological concepts from a reductive materialist perspective. This is challenging for me because I don’t consider myself a reductive materialist. I’ve been toying with the idea of pursuing a PhD that merges theology with neuroscience since completing a residency at CERN, where I invited particle physicists to talk about consciousness. Another strand of this research was concerned with altered states of consciousness induced by psychedelics and sensory stimuli. This led me to consider mystical and spiritual experience as a consequence of neurochemistry, with endogenous dimethyltryptamine (DMT) being the primary candidate.

These scientific explorations opened up a wider engagement with related topics such as astrophysics and concepts such as panspermia—that life proliferates through the cosmos via chemicals that reside on asteroids. I find panspermia a fascinating concept visually—I see it as a fractal, a microcosm of how some life proliferates here on Earth. Pollen hitching a ride on bees is a good example. Considering the story of Adam and Eve from an evolutionary perspective that emerges from extraterrestrial origins was something I unconsciously alluded to in 2013, but lacked the framework to articulate it.

Another aspect is the development of AI and LLMs in the last decade. In this work, LLMs have been used as a tool to generate the text but also as a subject. The trust we now have in algorithms feels so abundant that an extreme consequence to this transaction—feeding AI datasets in exchange for having to think less—could be that that trust turns into a faith, albeit to a non-supernatural, man-made, non-organic higher intelligence.

KA: The performance element involves collaborating with East 15 drama students—how have you approached working with live performers?

HM: Initially, the scope was just to translate the electrical signals into a choral piece. But then Focal Point opened the opportunity to work with East 15. This was the perfect opportunity to explore that theme of the title. I love working with people whose creative craft is very different from my own. I don’t have much experience in directing actors, but, like any artist, I’m more curious about what they bring to the table than how I can instruct them.

Many years ago, I did an exercise to transcribe the first few pages from the Book of Genesis and the Qur’an, replacing the word “God” with “Nature”. It somehow made more sense to me and made it easier to absorb. When invited to work with actors, I thought that dramatising the interaction of a person prompting an LLM to reinterpret biblical narratives, incorporating scientific concepts, could be great content for a script. That was the basis, and other elements such as shamanism emerged through workshops with the actors.

KA: The tension between sound and silence, music and noise, recurs in your practice. Do you see your work as trying to collapse those binaries or to highlight them?

HM: Both collapse and highlight. I’m a non-dual dualist or a non-binary digit. A way to visualise what I’m trying to describe might be to think about the one and zero of binary code, where the one intersects the zero.

Rumi’s poems often end in a reference to silence or the lack thereof. There is never really silence; there is always something audible. The Pierre Huyghe work in the exhibition exemplifies this, where he has scored all the incidental sounds made during a performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. The lack of silence became even more explicit in my work from 2017, Chamber for Endogenous DMT—a soundproof anechoic chamber with no lights. The first thing one realises is that our bodies inescapably make a lot of sound, then with time, with sensory deprivation, our minds can even generate auditory hallucinations. All noises are sounds, and sounds can be perceived and defined as music.

KA: Your installations often feel alive—systems that hum, flicker or pulse on their own terms. What excites you about this sense of autonomy?

HM: That electricity is a live, volatile natural phenomenon that allows us to become aware of our own awareness of space and time.

KA: Changing pace for a moment, where are your favourite places to eat in London, aside from home?

I randomly bumped into someone I know this evening, who owns a restaurant. They asked me the same question, as they seldom visit this neck of the woods (Hackney Wick), so I walked them to Lucia’s in Queen’s Yard for a piece of barbecued marrowbone before they turn vegan tomorrow. I’m also a big fan of Morito on Hackney Road, and Tayyabs in Whitechapel is always great. However, if you want real deal Pakistani food with more variety, I would recommend Nawaz on the top floor of the iconic Hoover Building in Perivale, or the classic canteens in Southall.

KA: And what are you currently reading/listening to?

HM: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch and a collection of music we’ll soon be releasing on our record label, OUTPUTS. It’s also an interesting project around translation. A bunch of artists—most of them visual artists—were commissioned to translate some Coptic scrolls that are widely considered to be musical scores. It’s the brainwave of artist Edward Summerton, who encountered the scrolls at Blackie House Museum in Edinburgh. He asked Dave Maclean of Django Django to enlist some artists to translate the scrolls into music, and he in turn enrolled me. We have some great tracks by Lucy Armstrong, Nurah Farahat, Kim Moore, Craig Coulthard, Nik Colk Void, Django Django, SOTTO (Luke Fowler & Victoria Morton), Helga Dorothea Fannon, and Earthworks. The album, Sun God Fraud Squad, will be out on OUTPUTS soon.



In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation is on view at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea until 13 September 2025.



Feature image: Haroon Mirza, Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet, 2025. Performance at Clifftown Theatre, Southend-on-Sea, June 2025. Commissioned by Focal Point Gallery. Photo: Amber Merry