Keith Armstrong is an experimental artist profoundly motivated by issues of social and ecological justice. His engaged, participative practices provoke audiences to comprehend, envisage and imagine collective pathways towards sustainable futures. He has specialised for thirty years in collaborative, experimental practices with emphasis upon innovative performance forms, site-specific electronic arts, networked interactive installations, alternative interfaces, art-science collaborations and socially and ecologically engaged practices.
Keith’s research asks how insights drawn from scientific and philosophical ecologies can help us to better invent and direct experimental art forms, in the understanding that art practitioners are powerful change agents, provocateurs and social catalysts. Through inventing radical research methodologies and processes he has led and created over sixty major art works and process-based projects, which have been shown extensively in Australia and overseas, supported by numerous grants from the public and private sectors.
He was the installation artist for the large-scale collaborative artwork Uramat Mugas showcased for the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10), Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane. In 2022 he showed his video artwork Common Thread in the exhibition Possibles' at ISEA 2022 (27th International Symposium of Electronic Art), Barcelona, Spain, and also at the V2 Lab (Rotterdam, Netherlands) and Novtec Festival (Lima, Peru). During 2023-5 he is presented a touring exhibition of a large scale social engaged artwork Carbon_Dating that fosters a 'community of care' around the sustenance of native grasses and grasslands. In 2024 he showed Analog Intelligence in ISEA 2024 (Everywhen) Brisbane, and began a new long term project called Forest Art Intelligence (FAI) that seeks to integrate a range of plant-supporting artworks within a rejuvenating forest, with the capacity to support the many intelligences of the re-emergent forest ecology. This was supported in 2024 by his second ANAT Synapse residency award (previously he was awarded this prestigious position in 2012). As part of this project he also presented the immersive multi screen work Translucent Kinship for ANAT Synapse/Reciprocity 2025. In 2025 he returned to South Africa to collaboratively create the works Radiant Walls (Un-learn Re-Learn) and What Remains Through Time (Slowness and Stillness),
(See his entire back catalogue HERE).
A full history of his work can be viewed at www.embodiedmedia.com.