MSHR is a duo composed of Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Whether it stands for “Material Sentience Habitat Ring”, “Mind Synthesis Hallway Reflector”, “MSHR Signal Hybrid Recursion”, or any other combination, the modulor acronym MSHR (pronounced mesher) is designed to allow for flexibility and change over time. 

The acronym seems aptly fitting; the two continuously highlight their evolution and modularity all the while acknowledging the influence of past encounters – like that of Oregon Painting Society, the five-person collective they were both initially a part of. In 2011, the two chose to operate as a duo (or what they refer to as “self-transforming entity”) and have recently celebrated a decade of commitment and collaboration.

Between the two is a massive technical skillset, manual dexterity, and some sort of tribal knowledge, granting them the luxury of bouncing their cybernetic experimentations comfortably across formats: installations, videos, live improvisations, web art. MSHR seem particularly keen on building things from scratch – like their modular synthesisers – either to achieve sonic precision or to tap into their own ideal of audiovisual perfection in light-audio feedback loops and circuitry. 

Among a growing roster of spaces, they’ve performed at Pioneer Works in New York, Human Resources in LA, and Transmediale in Berlin. Improvising, they work with the medley of gizmos and gadgets that surrounds them. These stagings, ceremonial and somewhat spiritual in their nature, become “sculptural” in the assembling of spatial and sonic dimensionalities and are anything but well-behaved. They’re not random, either, and the two refer to their active, controlled participation as “agency” with their “consoles” – the consoles being their hand-built instruments (for the most part).

Beyond their live work, MSHR have participated at various museum, gallery, and festival shows internationally with interactive installations and virtual environments, including at the Museum of Arts and Design and MoMA PS1 in New York. Their graphic work frequently overflows with contrasting colours; assemblages of circuit-like diagrams in geometric and kaleidoscopic compositions.

For those looking to get an introductory glimpse of MSHR, their web-based generative art, like Instance Terrain Crawler (2021) feeds a nostalgia for the low-tech, boundless exploration of the early days of the Internet. Anyone with a mouse can kick MSHR off the steering wheel, borrow the agency, and chart out some serendipity of their own.

Most recently, MSHR have been collaborating with Tomutonttu – founding member of the group Kemialliset Ystävät – and have been touring around. Birch has once again been busy building an array of new instruments, including a modular system and a handheld laser piece. Their sonic curiosities clearly haven’t dwindled.

Primarily based in Portland but often on the move, the two frequently participate in tours and residencies around the world. We caught up with MSHR to talk about sound, light, improvisation, audience participation, and their upcoming travel plans. 

How would you say that your work changed over time and since moving away from Oregon Painting Society?

Oregon Painting Society was a very open system with a fairly large group of people contributing to it. This allowed us to go through the process of interdisciplinary collaboration constantly and profoundly. By going through this process repeatedly, a shared vocabulary began to emerge. Being a part of that collective was a really important learning experience and we're permanently influenced by all the brains we melded with. Moving out of OPS, we wanted to keep the general framework of radical collaboration, but this time with only two people.

We have now been working as MSHR for over a decade. Our work is constantly mutating and its hypershape becomes clearer with each mutation. Since OPS, new areas of emphasis have emerged in MSHR's world, for example digital sculpture, VR, systems design and computer music. In OPS, we used to think of our installations as being like "VR without VR" – immersive, alternate realities where visitors could interact with physical material in novel ways, often through analog electronic interfaces. Now we make a lot of actual virtual spaces and objects. Digital sculpture and music feel like natural progressions from the ideas we explored in OPS.

Working with systems has also become a central focus for MSHR. This came as a natural extension of our practice of designing interfaces, both for use by other people in our installations and by ourselves in performance. We had a somewhat latent interest in cybernetics that woke up again when this clicked into place. Now, working with systems informs a great deal about our practice—across installations, electronic music, graphics, performance, and virtual sculpture. Combining working in a very intuitive way with system-based thinking has been a fruitful path for us.

Along with the process of adding new ideas and techniques to the hyper-object, some old ideas fall out of use. We suppose almost everything about our work is very different now, but it all sprouts from the same self-composting entity.

To what extent does your previous work inform your current work?

We tend to work in series that morph with each iteration – new series emerge when our practice has reached a state that requires it. We centre our work around the practice as opposed to the outputs of the practice. In this sense, it's very informed by past work, in the same way a person's self-identity might be informed by past experiences, or any other example of feedback. Ideas and techniques can often be traced across various projects. For example, we first developed our light-audio feedback systems as an interactive sculptural installation, and then later reconfigured it and integrated it into our portable live performance.

We conceptualise our practice as a system itself, with its outputs patched into its inputs. All aspects of our practice are constantly informing all other aspects. Our role is to be as present with our practice as we can – we believe that if the practice is good, the work is good. 

What has been your most memorable live performance so far, and does the audience influence your work at all?

Our work has always floated between sonic and visual arts contexts and between underground and institutional spaces. We like the variation because the context of a performance changes so much about what is communicated, so we can learn a lot by slightly shifting perspectives.

Connection with people is an important aspect of live performance, both through the energy in the room during the performance and through the community building around creating the event. Our audience is often other artists and we're definitely influenced by them, particularly our close friends and collaborators. Participating in a community centred around music is like an ongoing conversation enacted through performance. If everyone's contributing, listening to each other and being present with it, a really vibrant scene can emerge and change the world. 

You’ve recently been working with Tomutonttu and it’s such an exciting match to say the least. How did that collaboration come to be?

Thanks. We are really happy to get to collaborate with Jan. I guess our collaboration grew out of our friendship, which grew out of a mutual artistic appreciation. We've been big fans of his work for ages, and generally big fans of the Finnish underground music community that he's a part of. Because of this, we've made a point of going to Finland as often as possible and have many good friends there. Actually, this summer, we will be returning to Finland for a residency at Titanik in Turku, so we're now planning some more collaborative shows with Jan!

The earliest collaboration that we've done with Jan was between him and Brenna in 2010 when they remotely made a collaborative digital collage for his project Kemialliset Ystävät. Since then we've just been friends, visited each other and played some shows together. Last year, Jan asked us to collaborate with him in a show at Blank Forms in New York, so our recent work was born out of that – quadraphonic computer music performed using sculptural controllers, a series of quilts with live video projection, and an interactive audiovisual webpage, all of which we developed remotely during lockdown and then together in NYC for the live show. We had a lot of fun passing sounds and images back and forth and letting them mutate. Jan's approach to collaboration is really open and vivacious – it's a joy to collaborate with him!

In 2017, you were part of group shows at both MoMA PS1 and the Rubin Museum of Art. How does your work, which is often improvised, adapt for an institutional setting?

Improvisation is an intrinsic part of our live music because that work is made up of complex electronic feedback systems that aren't meant to be "controlled" – we interact with them as a collaborator. This keeps things interesting and requires a lot of mental presence, which is important to us. Our shows at PS1 and the Rubin emerged from other series of work that are distinct from our performance practice. Both of these pieces involved improvisation as they were being designed and constructed, but didn't involve improvisation by us as performers.

At PS1, we had a very generous opportunity to begin our "Nested Scapes" series, an installation series that combines generative computer music, virtual reality, physical installation, systems-based graphics and sound-reactive lights. This has continued to be an important vein of work for us. In this series, you could say that the VR user is the improviser – interacting with the virtual space and effecting changes in the generative sound and lights, performing for the audience of people waiting in line to use the headset.

At the Rubin, we shared a recording of an infinite, all-analog, generative light-audio feedback system that we made and recorded at a Signal Culture residency. This work is most closely related to our Knotted Gate series, which we've shown with Harvestworks and at the Museum of Arts and Design. Our goal with this work was to create high-complexity, life-like systems as a sonic and sculptural composition.

Adapting this work to an institutional setting was very natural – it would have been difficult to realise these projects without the support of these institutions.

Can you tell me about the software you use to build your web pieces, like Instance Terrain Crawler?

We think of Instance Terrain Crawler as being a virtual installation and audio composition that can be accessed through an internet browser. For installations we often use generative sound, but because of the limitations of streaming we decided to use only samples – we found it interesting to explore this concrete music in a spatial way. Instead of the one-dimensional line of magnetic tape, here we could interact with the recorded material in a three-dimensional space.

We try to use open-source software whenever possible. In this piece we did the 3D modelling in Blender, the live rendering in Godot, and the audio design in Supercollider and Audacity. 

ITC is more of a virtual reality composition embedded in a browser, but we also make works that use the webpage format as a medium to make a kind of HTML media collage labyrinth. A recent example is this collaboration with Tomutonttu.

What’s in the future for MSHR?

It looks like the next year has us developing a new cybernetic installation, a longform site-specific performance and a 7.1-channel audiovisual composition. But as we mentioned before, we try to focus on the practice rather than the outcomes, so another answer would be: spending time at a few residencies, experimenting with sculptural electronic systems, and swapping mental files with different art and music communities. We're overjoyed to be sharing work in person and playing live music again, so hopefully there will be a lot of that. We have a short tour booked in Europe over the summer, an installation in Brno, then a return to the US to do performances and a residency in New York City. Our hope for MSHR's future is just that we'll be able to continue developing and sharing our practice.

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Cover Credit: MIRA Digital Arts Festival

Writer | Bana Bissat

Bana Bissat is a Milan-based writer who reports on sound art for Sound of Life. She has written for Flash Art, Lampoon, and Cultured. @banabissat