Sebastian Kite is an installation artist based in London.
Exploring the intersection of art, architecture and music, his site-specific installations employ light, sound, projection and performance to illustrate new readings of spaces.
Kite’s immersive environments are created on an architectural scale, rooted in the embodied experience and the immaterial. Placing the audience at the centre of the experience, Kite seeks to disrupt our relationship with the space we live in, demanding a conscious engagement by questioning our perceptions of time.
Often performative, Kite works with choreographers, composers, filmmakers and fashion designers to create a collaborative practice. He has exhibited at Import Projects (Berlin), South Kiosk (London), Wanås Konst (Sweden), Sonica Festival (Glasgow), Salone del Mobile (Milan), as well as a diverse range of off-sites such as prisons, bunkers, railway stations and industrial sites.
Trained as an architect at The Glasgow School of Art and Westminster School of Architecture, Kite graduated in 2010. Since then he founded his own installation agency, Kite & Laslett (2010-13), and has worked as Head of Design at design agency Jotta Studio (2014-17).
Kite has taught at institutions such as The Bartlett UCL and Westminster School of Architecture and in 2015 received the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award.
Projects
- HorizonsIn Horizons, two horizontal beams of light, consisting of opposing complementary colours, travel autonomously in opposing vertical directions. Driven by four stepper motors, the lights align to produce an artificial white horizon line in the space. Simulating reality, the colour of the room shifts in constant flux, subservient to the behaviour of the machine. Standing afar, an ethereal and meditative atmosphere is produced, a transcendental state evoking place and memory. In this work fluoresc
- HalideStocks floating, bubbles bursting, clouds storing. In the fourth industrial revolution we are told to look up to the sky. - Klaus Schwab Halide is an installation that explores the materiality of the internet, specifically focusing on the web of undersea data cables that link the UK to Europe, Africa and the Americas that come to shore at the hidden cove of Porthcurno at the Western extremes of the rugged Cornish coastline. 16mm footage filmed around Porthcurno and the nearby satellite listeni
- PanopticThe installation is an instrument for observation, a device through which the ocular perception of the prison is altered. The project explores the notion of panoptics, a term derived from the philosophical and architectural concept of the panopticon, first conceived by Jeremy Bentham during the Age of Enlightenment, a spatial paradigm through which society can be observed and controlled. The project investigates the correlation between voyeurism and architectural space and how panoptic-based arc
- ContinuumFor most of human history, there was not a word for the colour that saturates the sky and stains immaculate bodies of waters. When blue finally seeped into our languages, the colour became a power that inspired the arts, sciences. In the visible light spectrum, blue rays have shorter wavelengths and, therefore, carry more energy. Employing blue as a medium in architecture can alter a viewer’s sense of time and space. In this way, the psychological and emotional workings of the colour are infinit
- We will meet in the place where there is no darknessIn George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, the author makes reference to a place where there is no darkness. A place our lead protagonist Winston Smith believes to be free from the oppression of the totalitarian state under which he lives. Deceived to visit this place by the state Police, Smith instead finds himself under the glaring lights of an interrogation cell, permanently lit to aid his state of torture. For We will meet in the place where there is no darkness, artist Sebastian Kite crea
- EXPThe project entitled EXP, is Kite’s first exploration of the relationship between light, architecture and the urban environment. The project focuses on the disused Millennium Mills in the docks of Silvertown, a towering vestige to London’s industrial past. One of a few remaining uninhabited parts of London, the expansive and desolate site acts as a testing ground for experimental interventions. EXP consists of a series of photographic studies, performance and the design of a hypothetical ins
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Projects credited in
- On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From HereAn expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, "On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here" excavates layers of myth, geology and technology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus contemporary processes of nation building and myth-making in Kazakhstan through the remnants of Soviet technological infrastructures that haunt the country’s landscape. Shot on 16mm, the camera is drawn across the landscape taking in loc
Skills
- Art