David Fyans is an artist based in Dundee, Scotland where he recently graduated with a BA (hons.), First Class in Time Based Art and Digital Film. He deals in sound, performance, installation, text and still and moving images to convey the conceptual ideas behind his work His main influences lean towards subconscious interventions, mysticism, psychology, psychogeography, extra-dimensional and liminal spaces and ruminations on time and our understanding of it.
David Fyans has also released a number of conceptually weighted albums including a 40 minute audio-visual piece, both digitally and in hard copy, under the Erstlaub alias on Broken20, Highpoint lowlife, Moving Furniture and CONV and has performed in Germany, London and Scotland.
Most recently, Fyans has been commissioned to produce soundworks and thematically specific performances for exhibitions/screenings including the construction, composition and performance of a graphical score based on books from the Centre for Artists’ Book archive at the DCA, Dundee for DJCAD Exhibitions Department and the construction and performance of themed post atomic retro-futurist musical interventions for the London screening of Atom Town, a film by Gair Dunlop at Arts Catalyst in Clerkenwell in June 2011. His entheogenic soundwork ‘Climbing The Peacock’s Tail’ was selected as part of the Uncanny Sound group show and exhibited at Tactic, Cork in September 2011. The Persistence of Decay, a 2 hour long, process driven, textural piece has been selected for inclusion in radioCona’s Radio Arts Space in Slovenia.
Fyans is also responsible for founding the National Tropospherics Commission artists collective and produces work under a variety of pseudonyms for it in addition to curating the work of other artists within the collective. He is also Art Director and assists in the co-running of Broken20, a Glasgow based record label which releases both physical and digitally via channels such as itunes, Boomkat, Zero”, etc.
For as long as I can remember, I have had the overwhelming desire to take things apart to see how they work, in many ways, I think that this was my artistic practice pushing me, a desire to dismantle the world, to address the elements of cause and effect and to consider the interconnectedness of components.
As an artist, I am primarily concerned with our relationships with space, both physical and mental and often work to highlight the importance and significance of the internal landscapes we construct and inhabit based around memory and emotion.
Within my own practice, which includes sound, text, still and moving photography, composition, installation and performance, I try to convey concepts and philosophies, small ideas, personal critique and observations on the times we live in. In presenting the everyday and mundane as fantastical (and conversely the fantastical as mundane), it encourages the viewer to delve deeper into their own personal landscapes, to scrape back the layers of the spaces they inhabit, to acknowledge the importance of their own constructed internal spaces.
Art has the profound ability to change the world, perhaps not in one sweeping gesture, but little by little. In exploring and curating philosophies, works which have come before, personal experiences and investigations into meaning, form and context, we may gradually learn to see the world in a more complete way and our affirm own position within it.
I have recently started to consider my work as a form of ‘micro-activism’. While I am not focussed on exploring a single issue, I would like to think that my work may lead to people considering everyday, causal factors such as time, history, philosophy, sociology and see their own relationships with space in a new light. By stopping to think about the spaces we currently inhabit (and the versions of reality we construct around us) and how they came to exist in this way, one cannot help but feel more connected and part of their surroundings and as a result become more sensitive to larger issues.
I am a creative, focussed, passionate practitioner and consider research as a varied and constant everyday process. Every book, webpage, street, draincover, etc is a source of potential inspiration. I explore the spaces I move through, influenced by a diverse range of artists, philosophers, film makers and writers, I seek out the small, often unnoticed details that lie beyond the obvious. The subtle, and sometime less subtle, effects of time, human intervention and social and historical movements directing my work, the space whispering its secrets to me and directing both my traversal of it and, in many cases, the subsequent works that will be produced.
I am an artist, not for fame and fortune nor notoriety and scandal, I am an artist because I feel it is a calling, I have always been, I will always be, I strive every day to become a better one and to share my passion, emotion and enlightenments with others along the way.
January 2010 – Performance/Screening of Sleepwalking into the Underworld at the Hidden Door Festival, Edinburgh
August 2010 – Screening of selected works at -SCAPE at the Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick
August 2010 – Performance of The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep at the N_ilk festival in the Botanic Gardens, Dundee
February 2011 – Performance of Inverted Memory as part of the EMAF Screening Tour at DCA, Dundee
March 2011 – Re(Collections) Part II, an interactive soundwork sourced from redundant museum artifacts as part of Collections Part II, Cooper Gallery, Dundee
May 2011 – The Breath between Marks – the construction and performance of a graphical score from elements taken from the Centre for Artists Books, DCA, Dundee
June 2011 – Distress Transmission – a conceptual audio installation at Leith Festival Art Expo, Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh
July 2011 – Construction and performance of themed post atomic retro-futurist musical interventions for the London screening of Atom Town, a film by Gair Dunlop at Arts Catalyst, Clerkenwell
July 2011 – The Ghost Other – Audio design, live treatment and performance accompanying Joss Allen and Joanna Foster’s piece ‘A Slip Of The Other’s Tongue’. Performed as part of the D-Air Festival in Dundee
September 2011 – Climbing The Peacock’s Tail – An entheogenic audio sculpture selected for the Uncanny Sound group show at Tactic, Cork.
October 2011 – Performative Lecture – Interventions on the theme of Atom Town with Gair Dunlop at the Shared Imagination Symposium, DCA, Dundee.
December 2011 – Radio Arts Space, radioCona, Slovenia – The Persistence of Decay selected to be played in ŠKUC gallery Ljubljana, FM broadcast, internet streaming and as part of the Pixxelpoint festival between the 7th – 15th of December.
January 2012 - Premiere performance of Marconi's Shipwreck at The Outer Church, Brighton.
February - March 2012 - The Persistence of Decay - Nachtradiofestival Radio Arts Space, Potsdam, Berlin.
April 2012 - The Persistence of Decay - Transmittal Exhibition, Greene County Council for the Arts Gallery, New York.
May 2012 - Crossing Point - Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, Dundee, Scotland.