Networked: Ernest Edmonds

Curated in collaboration with art historian Francesca Franco, the exhibition brings together two landmark works that trace Edmonds’ practice from his early experiments in pre-Internet communication to his most recent globally networked installation.

Timed to coincide with SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver (10—14 August) and the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, the exhibition positions Edmonds’ work at the intersection of generative systems, communication theory, and audience-driven interaction. At once playful and profound, Networked explores how Edmonds has consistently harnessed emerging technologies not only as tools, but as collaborators in shaping new kinds of aesthetic experience.

At the heart of the exhibition is the premiere of Quantum Tango (2025), Edmonds’ most ambitious networked artwork to date. The piece is structured as a real-time, interactive triptych, with each panel located in a different city: London (Gazelli Art House), Vancouver (SIGGRAPH), and Padua (San Gaetano Cultural Centre). The three locations are connected via live data and video streams, enabling participants in each city to shape — and be shaped by — the evolving composition across the network. Shifting colour bands, patterns, and photographic fragments taken by Edmonds in each city, blend algorithmic logic with live feedback from audience movement. Departing from the classical binary logic of earlier computational art, Quantum Tango draws on the uncertain, probabilistic principles of quantum logic, introducing a poetic openness to how the work unfolds. 

Displayed alongside this new commission is a freshly reconstructed version of Edmonds’ Communications Game, first devised in 1969, before the advent of the Internet. Described by the artist as a “communication machine,” the original Communications Game used simple light signals to create interaction between participants who could not see one another. Its core function was not to deliver information, but to generate an experience of shared attention and responsive engagement — a radical rethinking of what both communication and art could be.

Unlike a conventional artwork tied to a single object, Communications Game was conceived as a modular, conceptual system that could be realised in many forms. Over the years it has been reinterpreted with changing technologies — from hand-built circuits in the 1970s to software-based versions in the 1990s and, most recently, Arduino-powered reconstructions for exhibitions in Brazil and the UK. The current iteration at Gazelli Art House faithfully restores the original structure using contemporary tools, allowing visitors to engage directly with a work that anticipated today’s interest in participatory and networked media art.

Together, Quantum Tango and Communications Game reveal Edmonds’ enduring fascination with the aesthetics of interaction — not as spectacle, but as experience, unfolding through behaviour, attention, and contingency. His approach reflects a lifelong inquiry into the role of systems in creativity, and how technology can serve not to replace the artist, but to expand the space of aesthetic possibility.