Jack Lander
Based In: Glasgow, Scotland
Artist Bio:
Jack is an artist, designer and researcher studying for a PhD at the University of Glasgow. He has a multimedia practice grounded in technical and synthetic image-making, working between the virtual and the actual. He was a founding member of the anarchic performance collective 85A and worked as an artist and designer with the experimental theatre company Untitled Projects. His work has been seen at The Tate Modern, The Dublin Science Centre, The ICA London and The Kunstmuseum Bonn. He has collaborated with organisations including Warp Records, Editions Mego, Scottish Dance Theatre, Void Nomadic Gallery, Fusion Kulturcosmos and Sonar Barcelona. Jack is also a laser designer and rave enthusiast and has made shows for artists including Aphex Twin, Florian Hecker, Sega Bodega, Lorenzo Senni, and The Modern Institute.
Artist Statement:
Artist statements are a trap. I’m reluctant to be tied down to specifics, but contradictions and experimentation are fundamental to what I do. I work mostly alone from a small cupboard in my studio in Scotland; process is key to what I do, as I see constant methodological reinvention as the only pursuit worth pursuing seriously. The truth is, I do not have much faith in the Art world as it currently operates; much of it has been commodified, and the measure of its success is mostly quantified by things that don’t interest me.
I guess this whole interview is essentially an artist's statement. The issue for me is that I will probably disagree with loads of what I’ve written within a few days or weeks. For sure, I’ll think it's horse shit in a few years, so if you are reading this in the future, take it all with a pinch of salt.
10 Questions with Jack Lander
Q.1:
To begin, could you introduce your artistic practice and reflect on how it has evolved since your early training in fine art photography?
During the final year of my undergraduate degree at the Glasgow School of Art, I began experimenting with laser-based holography, creating miniature inverted “landscapes”. These were made by taking clay impressions of cracks in walls and rendering them onto glass plates. These works are the first things I consider both aesthetically and conceptually successful. They turn you inside out, whilst hinting at how the absurdly massive is always present in the macro. At around the same time, a good friend, Oli Coles, was studying for a PhD in liquid crystal physics in Manchester and experimenting with using sound to oscillate larger, more powerful lasers. This blew my mind. I remember lying on the floor of his room after being at a club, mesmerised by a rapidly morphing vector Lissajous patterns on the ceiling that felt and appeared fully three-dimensional and otherworldly. I developed a fascination with laser light and its uses; this fascination has endured in my work and research. From holograms, intersecting scanned sheets of light in clubs, synesthetic vectors, and, recently, LIDAR systems, coherent light has an inherent ability to render extra dimensions.
Inversion No. 4 – The Orifices of Habitual Living – Lander J. (2008)
I consider photography my foundational craft, but the medium's flatness and quite rigid, formulaic technical processes have often been restrictive and unfulfilling. Despite being a relatively young medium, it has shown a tendency towards repetition and homogeneity. As the first medium I seriously engaged with, photographic theory and discourse have heavily influenced how I conceptualise my work, often as a jumping-off point or something to react against. I find that much of the contemporary photography I see is conceptually and aesthetically dull; probably the machinic characteristics of the process have come to define its epistemologies, which, almost invariably, lead to conservative work. Perhaps, as Flusser would have it, artists are functionaries of programs and apparatuses, and I think never more so than when using networked cameras. I am increasingly frustrated with blandness as a visual and conceptual endgame; even when satirical, it just doesn’t cut it for me. I want to be affected, overwhelmed, unnerved, and thrilled by culture and thinking. Raves, clubs and gigs do this way more effectively than most art presentations; feeling is still at the forefront in these spaces, I want to bring that sensibility into my artwork.
If you push hard enough against a medium’s program, then there is the potential to reveal something more fundamental, ineffable, and possibly map a route back to the profundity of early narcotic experience.
Lasers for Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume 2, 30th Anniversary. Tate Modern. 2025 With Shaun Murphy, Photograph – Ruth Esme Mitchell.
The Sensorial Commons v Directed Energy Weapons. Lander J. (2026) Photo – Weiwei Yi
Following graduation, I got involved in club nights and performance-based work, and started an art collective called 85A. At first, we were working out of an old ice cream van repair warehouse in Partick, then we became sort of uninvited artists-in-residence at the newly established Glue Factory in Glasgow. 85A became my main creative outlet, and we worked together for about 7 years, producing something like 18 large-scale shows. It was the best of times with brilliant people, but that kind of full-throttle pursuit of hedonism and art can wear you down.
The Crusher – 85A Collective (2012)
I was also working as a freelance theatre maker and laser show operator in the rave and festival scene. I wasn’t able to express it at the time, but I was becoming disillusioned with art as an industry: it was too competitive, cutthroat, and full of what I perceived at the time as phoniness; mostly, it had failed to deliver on many of its lofty promises, society wasn’t undergoing any dramatic changes for the better, and we were all still broke and anxious. Disenchantment and detachment are either catalysts for creativity or they cripple it; you don’t usually get to decide which side the coin falls on.
I needed a break from collaborating and creating, and also a bit of time to recalibrate, but instead, I lashed out and rejected the whole thing. I became a professional roller skater and had a short-lived tilt at being a darts player. This was fun for a while, but I inevitably drifted back into the arts thanks to some good people who still believed I had something of value to contribute.
During the pandemic, it became difficult to make a living as a freelance artist; all of the work I had lined up was cancelled, and the precarity of my situation led me to take a job in the care sector. This was a bit of a shock to the system and involved long hours of work in often challenging situations. To keep my art practice moving forward, I enrolled in an online MA at the University of South Wales. I figured it would be a good opportunity to work alone again. For a long time, I had been collaborating with companies and drifted into a situation where I was working more as a facilitator of other people’s ideas than as a maker of my own. As part of my MA, I worked a lot with photogrammetry and 3D imaging. It was a full-circle thing, back to holography, albeit this time digitally, with ones and zeros and virtuality rather than chemistry and materials. The technology had caught up with the ideas. Instead of operating at the macro level as I had previously, the development of commercially available camera drone technology enabled me to work on a much larger scale, capturing thousands of aerial images of landscapes that were then used to create massive 3D digital terrain maps.
These ultimately served as the basis for an open-world video game that sought to address land reclamation through simulation. I’m now expanding on this work and research by undertaking a PhD at the University of Glasgow, and many of my past approaches, modes, and interests are coalescing around military landscapes in Scotland. I am especially interested in and engaged with virtual/augmented reality systems and synthesised sound as ways to interface and describe these edgelands and forbidden places. The theoretical aspect looks at how technical systems shape perception, space, and behaviour, and how artistic practice might create forms of interference, trespass, or deviation within those systems.
Monolith to the Buzzed. Gaza digitally reconstructed from found video. Lander J. (2025)
Q.2:
Your work moves between installation, performance, moving image, sound and technical design. Do you think of yourself primarily as an artist, or as someone constructing systems and situations for experience?
For a long time, when people asked me what I did, I would oscillate between telling them I was a maker or a technician. I found it pretty cringeworthy to refer to myself as an artist. These days, I am more likely to refer to myself as an artist, but not always; it depends a lot on the context. For example, I might be designing and programming a laser show for a festival or rave, in which case the work is primarily that of a technician. I am trying to make the systems I am using perform a particular, quite specific task that, in itself, has a predefined set of rules and expectations. There is, of course, an artistic element to this work, but the majority of it is a series of technical exercises and processes in which something eventually needs to work and/or materialise. In a purely artistic context, which may or may not include coding, programming, and technical elements, there isn’t often this requirement; the process is sufficient in itself, whether it works or not is sort of irrelevant. I do construct systems and situations for experience, but I don't think that whether these are art is that important; I’m happy for people to call me and my work whatever they want.
Anaglyph Jungle. Lander J. (2015)
Q.3:
Collaboration has been central throughout your career, particularly through collective projects and interdisciplinary partnerships. What has collective working taught you about creativity and artistic authorship?
It was extremely valuable for me to work so closely with others, especially within the 85A Collective. I found an identity within the group and, unwittingly, undertook a multifaceted apprenticeship in which I learnt how to build big stuff, wire circuits, put on events, make loud statements, and, most importantly, understand how others' strengths can complement my own. Art School was less collaborative and more competitive, with a focus on individualism. As a group, we were ejected into the post-2008 global financial crisis landscape with no real tools or ideas for either surviving or, let alone, comprehending how economic systems alter society and the collective psyche. At art school, you are essentially taught how to turn yourself into a brand; individuality is held in the highest regard, and your success in marketing yourself depends on your ability to convince people that your very specific brand of uniqueness is capable of producing objects that are so rare and peculiar that they can be commodified and speculated on. This is essentially a large part of what you taught at art school. 85A was a reaction against this, a process of unlearning; we were largely anonymous; no one was credited by name for their work; we sold only experiences. The ticket prices were deliberately affordable and never covered the production costs. We all worked jobs to pay for the work. We pushed back against what we perceived as a sterile, capital-corrupted art scene, so I learned something important about anti-establishment sentiment.
85A Collective – Dark Behaviour, The Arches. (2014) Photograph - Neil Davidson
Q.4:
Many of your projects involve experimentation with unfamiliar technologies or environments. How important is experimentation — and even failure — within your creative process?
I was born in 1983, which puts me in this strange position of being young but self-aware right at the moment the world began transitioning to the digital age. We didn’t have a computer at home until I was about 10, mobile phones weren’t a thing until I was 14, but I was at an ideal age to experience the beginning of the internet. My stepdad was a local press photographer, and so I was exposed to image-making from an early age; this is how I came to create pictures. He made the transition from analogue to digital quite early, so I was aware of this happening too. I learnt analogue and digital almost concurrently. I think that when your art practice is built around a technical medium rather than more traditional methods such as drawing or painting, you find yourself dealing a lot with innovation and change in tools, which, in turn, leads to different forms of experimentation. I was also lucky to have a group of interesting friends who played in bands, produced music, and were always trying to subvert, experiment, and do things differently. Software was changing and innovating all the time, too; it was an exciting time.
Regarding failure, the cliche goes that you have to fail to learn; this is, of course, true, but the greater truth is that there is no choice; you will fail over and over. If you can force failure in systems by trying to make them do things they aren’t designed to do, you can find novel insights, so the best thing to do is to seek out and facilitate failures.
The unusual environments, in particular the military landscapes I am focused on at the moment, stem from a need to apply my experiments and practice to something external to myself, kind of like looking outwards from the edges to look inwards on myself, if that makes sense? There is also the fact that I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do, where I can and can’t go. I enjoy transgressions, trespass, in particular. Military landscapes and sites are among the most forbidden places and, as such, offer me the greatest intrigue and opportunity to scratch the itch.
Gare Loch Nuclear Weapon Facility. Lander J. (2026)
Q.5:
Technology appears in your work not only as a tool but as a subject of investigation. How has your relationship with technological systems shaped the questions you ask as an artist?
First, it’s important that you understand that I’m neither a techno-utopian nor a techno-pessimist.
Technology is a subject of the work, and I am subjectivised by technology. Gilbert Simondon writes, "The opposition established between culture and technics, between man and machine, is false and without foundation." (Simondon, 2017 [1958], p. 16) We are also functions of technology; cogs in systems of control. This is an idea posited by Vilém Flusser in 1983 and one that makes a lot of sense today, especially when you think about how our data is collected, used and sold. Where some people choose to detox and strip technology from their lives, I reckon this is nearly impossible. I choose to embrace it in the hope of finding myself in a position to understand it better. It’s also highly addictive by design, and I am a person who enjoys addictions.
The questions I try to ask are things like: if I am central to, or part of, a technology's function, how can I alter my position in the system to gain an additional or novel perspective? Where are the peripheries of systems? Where fo their excesses spill out? What kind of turbulence exists at the edges? What kinds of transactions are taking place between me and the system? How do the logics of these systems infiltrate and influence non-technical aspects of my life? Where are the quiet technologies hiding, and why are they so silent?
Until recently, I used the term misuse heavily' to describe my interactions with technology, but a recent conversation with Professor Eirini Nedelkopoulou has made me think differently. Erini suggested that there might not be any such thing as misuse, only other use. This resonated, and so my terminology has changed to reflect this more nuanced understanding. A conceptual reframing like this can fundamentally alter how we understand systems, which in turn changes the types of questions we can ask. Critically assessing how your relationship with technology, whilst being deeply implicated in its functioning, is tricky, as the point where the technology ends and we begin is almost impossible to discern; in fact, there may not even be an edge, just a smear, what Deleuze and Guattari might call a threshold position. They write, "A line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293). This is a good challenge for an artist to work with.
Q.6:
Across your practice, audiences often encounter immersive environments rather than discrete objects. What interests you about creating experiences that are spatial, sensory and time-based?
I am unfazed by most art objects; they are usually definitive and lack potential. Once something has been actualised into material form, it loses a massive amount of potential unless, of course, you precariously balance it or load it into a catapult or gun. There are, of course, examples of art objects that have space for mutation or are innately unstable. Eva Hesse’s sculptures and some of Eduardo Kac’s bio art works come to mind, but these are unicorns. Objects in states of change generally unsettle people. The artist is celebrated for their instability, but the things they make usually must be stable enough to be speculated on and resold. A static object with an explainable meaning can be neatly inserted into a historical-critical discourse and is then a potentially valuable asset. Bizarrely, the artist's perceived psychological instability contributes to their value, which is why you can feel like you are being encouraged to lose your mind in the creative process.
Technological apparatuses can be thought of as objects, things such as cameras and computers. The mechanics, chemistry, physics and electronics create pathways for movement. These have potential built into their programs; the programs demand new use cases, but these are often only achievable through concerted effort to undermine their latent programs, through activities such as hacking. A solution might be to build your own technological objects that retain their potential, whilst having the distinct advantage of allowing you to fully understand what is inside the black box. I recently made an experimental wavetable synthesiser that scans landscape heightmaps to produce sound. This is the type of thing I think is fruitful.
Landscape Wavetable Synthesiser UI. Lander J. (2026)
Experientially, it's not often that I have been emotionally moved by an object; I once cried in the Van Gogh museum, but largely at the realisation that someone could have committed so much to their work. The sheer volume of intense, focused labour involved touched and saddened me. The live experience or virtual environment is usually more unstable, and if instability is something you are trying to communicate and work with, then creating experiences, scenarios, and spaces sets the conditions for random events, collapse, or disruption. There’s more that potentially happens in complex systems, and that is exciting. As artists, we should all be actively engaged in destabilising systems; in my opinion, objects do this best when they are thrown, broken, or hacked, not when they hang on walls or sit on plinths.
Q.7:
Alongside artistic production, your work engages deeply with research and theoretical inquiry. How do academic research and artistic intuition inform one another in your practice?
I read this poem by Jim Dodge from his book Rain on the River, which I think is kind of cool and plays with the idea of where theory can be in the creative process.
Thinking through things
Things through thinking
Through thinking things
For a long time, I thought I needed to make theory into practice. Many artists, myself included for a while, believe this will give them credibility. The problem with this approach is that it tends towards illustration. There are problems with the academy at the moment in understanding what makes art practice vital and useful in wider academic contexts. There are many opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration; however, the emphasis is usually not on co-creation. What people want is for the artist to make something that helps communicate a set of already defined ideas. This is a dead end and a missed opportunity. Artists and makers have the potential to bring something much more valuable to these situations and inquiries. Namely, the ability to disrupt methodologies and practically challenge thinking through challenging and experimental processes.
Having a theoretical understanding is important, and I spend quite a lot of time reading (I work in a university library), but having it front and centre during the process of making, and letting it dictate the work, doesn’t often yield interesting outcomes. In itself, it isn’t wrong or right to work to a theoretical recipe; lots of people enjoy this type of work, and there is a place for it. I prefer to let theory coexist with intuition. To this end, I collect concepts the same way I collect new words to expand my vocabulary; they help broaden the scope of enquiry rather than dictate the direction of the work. Being an artist within an academic institution is great for this; you are surrounded by people whose primary pursuit is to think things through and engage with theory; they know things you don’t and can help you contextualise your work within different frameworks. It happens all the time that intuitive artwork touches on or describes a particular theoretical concept without the artist having any clue that it exists. When you learn this, it becomes another piece of your own personal ontology. The more pieces you have in this multi-dimensional mosaic of ideas and perspectives, the better equipped and alert you are to uncover something interesting when you make stuff in the future. To me, practice, theory, and research are all ways of expressing the same drive; they need to exist in an amorphous, nebulous state rather than a linear one.
Q.8:
Your projects frequently respond to cultural, technological or geographical contexts. How does place — particularly Scotland — influence the way you approach image-making and storytelling?
My research and practice are currently focused on militarised landscapes in Scotland. My interest in landscape started during my Master's. There is a weird thing that happens when you are a perpetual and compulsive image maker: it becomes difficult to make work in the place where you live and exist. It’s to do with over-familiarity; it’s much easier to go to a new place where ideas, forms, colours and situations are alien to you. This is partly why people take loads of photographs when they are on holiday. As a challenge to myself, I wanted to make a project that was Scotland-based but just far enough outside my frame of familiarity, not completely alien but obscure enough to bypass the psychological filters that dampen your senses in familiar places.
Hyperreal Estate – In Game Still. Lander J. (2023)
I read some statistics about private and public land ownership in Scotland that were quite surprising to me. The report was made in 2014 by the Environmental and Forestry Directorate, and it stated that “currently 432 private land owners own 50% of the private land in rural Scotland. The latest estimate of Scotland's population is 5,327,000, so this means that half of a fundamental resource for the country is owned by 0.008% of the population.” (Gov.Scot 2014) This sparked an interest in private land, specifically in the means and modes of trespass through immersion or representation. Most of my understanding of place comes from the media I consume. I think this is true of most people. Even after I have visited a place, my memories are of the images I took or saw rather than of actual experiences. Scotland has been very successful in managing the representational narratives of its landscape through imagery, often romantic, nearly always conservative. To disrupt these narratives, it is not enough to create new or alternative images; the medium of representation must also be considered and challenged. I started researching representations of Scotland in the virtual world, specifically in video games. There were many examples, but nearly all of them still worked with standard representational tropes; they had either consciously or unconsciously adopted from existing painting, photography, etc. What ended up being most exciting about this work was the idea of using technologies to see the unseeable.
Reclaimed Land No.11 – Lander J. (2021)
Over the past couple of years, I have been trying to think of landscapes as components of technology and politics. The nuclear base at Gare Loch is a good example of this; the site was chosen post-WW2 for its naturally deep waters and easy access to the North Atlantic. The geography suits the purpose; therefore, the landscape becomes a constituent part of the military machine. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the Scottish National Party had a policy to remove submarines from Scotland if the country voted for independence. This was completely unacceptable to the British government, as there is no obvious place outside Scotland where they could be relocated. This forbidden landscape is in an unholy technological union with world-ending potential. This is fascinating to me, especially when its potential is so difficult to see or even imagine.
Q.9:
Do you imagine a specific audience when developing new work, or does meaning emerge only once viewers physically encounter the piece?
The stuff I make now is quite niche, and I am less concerned with audience response than I have been in the past. This is a liberating space to operate within, if sometimes painfully introspective and necessarily narcissistic. With 85A and most of the theatre/entertainment work I have made, the audience experience has always been a central consideration; in a live scenario, the people watching are very active in the space, and the roles of receiver and transmitter are rarely clear-cut, often reversing and influencing the work in the moment. If a part isn’t landing or losing people's attention in the space, it would generally be adjusted on the fly or for the next performance. An example of this is a DJ's skill and experience in adjusting their set based on the room's energy. That dialogical dynamic should always be a key consideration in the live space. However, now I try to think less about the audience and just make the work I believe best reflects my own experience or insight. My own learning through process is by far the most important part, whether the work gets seen or not, and who it gets seen by doesn’t particularly matter to me. As for meaning, I think leaving that open to individual interpretation is far better than me telling people what is happening. That all being said, I love hearing people's criticisms and thoughts about what I make.
Q.10:
Finally, looking ahead, what directions or questions feel most urgent for your practice as artistic production continues to intersect with emerging technologies and shifting cultural realities?
Right now, I am working a lot with Gaussian Splatting, a relatively new form of image-based space generation. I have been spending time on the edges of various military sites in Scotland, collecting data for a 3D large-scale virtual experience. I have become interested in how the images break down at the peripheries, where the data becomes sparser. At these points, the image begins to smear. I think this type of edge-based techno-smearing speaks to something important within systems of representation that drive affect as well as the logic of militarised landscapes, but I’m still very much in an early phase of figuring this out. Alongside this, I’m trying to formulate my own definition of the technical landscape, which will hopefully help me understand how technology creates points of intersection and blurring between the actual and the virtual, the person and the machine, with the ultimate goal of discovering what forms of affect, transgression and trespass are possible in deep simulation systems. My interest in technical landscapes owes something to Gilbert Simondon's observation that the opposition between humans and technology is largely false. Technical objects are not external tools but crystallisations of human thought and action that continue to evolve alongside us (Simondon, 2017). So then I have to ask, where am I in all this? Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari's writing on smooth and striated space has encouraged me to think about military landscapes not as static territories but as dynamic systems of movement, control, resistance and becoming.
The absolute most urgent question right now, though, is how to understand systems and resist being subjectivised by them.
Faslane Peace Camp. Lander J. (2026)