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Trip The Light Fantastic With This Cosmic Digital Artwork

London-based artist Tom Sewell has visualized exoplanets as psychedelic orbs and created a space for meditation on the Internet. His work may bring you into a new dimension.

Lead image: Fabric Print Design for ‘Odyssey Nebula’ shoes by Eytys 

London-based multidisciplinary artist,Tom Sewell, would get along swimmingly with the late, cosmically-inclined jazz artist Sun Ra. While the avant-garde musician claimed to be from Saturn, and had song titles like "There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)," Sewell makes psychedelic image that seamlessly fuse surrealism and galactic themes without feeling like the type of dorm room, poster kitsch you'd find in the bargain bin of Newbury Comics.

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Sewell's distinct (and eye-catching) aesthetic is applied to a variety of media, yielding mystical photos, videos, illustrations, and even prints on scarves—all with some nod to digitization, transcendence, and the universe at large. Recently, the artist unveiled The Empty Room, an online installation that marks a space for meditation on the Internet, and is current showing a series of digital works on Post Matter that visualize exoplanets as psychedelic orbs. He's a pretty trippy guy whose work is almost literally out of this world.

The Creators Project got in touch with Sewell and chatted about the transience of the digital world, his (maybe unsurprising) admiration for Huxley's Doors of Perception, and about sharing his name with another multi-media artist who was a protege of Duchamp.

Poster for Super/Collider Tenerife Expedition  

The Creators Project: Your work has a highly digitized appearance, yet you often present your work as prints, scarves, and other physical objects. How does your work relate to divides between the physical and digital?

Tom Sewell: I don't really think of my work in terms of a digital aesthetic. It's more that the computer is a tool that I've learned to use better than almost any other. I hope that the things I am making can exist in a real way in people’s lives so it's important to get them out into the world; there's a potential transience to the digital world that physical objects can begin to overcome. I feel that the digital is just another tool and a platform that exists alongside all the other ones we’ve already got. Ultimately I'm interested in making images and the computer is a huge aid in that process.

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What are some of the influences?

I guess nature and science are pretty high up, the sheer inexhaustible wonder that is the world, its landscapes and the universe. The psychedelic influence is partly from things like Huxley's Doors of Perception and Oliver Sack’s Hallucinations that show that visual strangeness is bound up in the human experience, never too far from the surface of things. Ideas from meditation influence some of my video work in its repetitiveness, at least in terms of creating space to do nothing. A friend of mine once told me my work reminded him of Yamantaka Eye's. I couldn't hope for a bigger compliment.

You work in a variety of mediums, including illustration, video, photograph, and more. Does the medium influence what you create, or do your ideas dictate your choice of medium?

I think there's a dialogue between the medium and content. The medium makes you express things in a certain way. The computer leads more often to dense, brightly colored, heavily psychedelic work because I'm using a light filled screen that's capable of millions of colors and an infinite revision process. Whilst, say, drawing is inevitably going to produce, slower, calmer, more meditative work simply because it takes more time and there's less opportunity to change what you're doing while you're doing it. The video work is more often an expression of particular ideas around color and repetition so I guess the medium is a consequence of the content.

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Ham, Cheese, Lettuce, Bread, Cheese 

Your work often includes images of food, particularly fruit—what is it about food that sparks your creativity?

I think it's the forms. They're an amazing expression of the diversity of what nature is capable of. Anything I make will never be more beautiful than anything nature has made. More recently I've tried to move away from including food so much. I wouldn't want to become forever associated with one thing.

Do you have any planned exhibitions in the near future?

I’m doing an online collaboration at the moment with POSTMatter throughout all of July. I'm creating daily-imagined visions of exoplanets interpreted as revolving psychedelic orbs. I've only made 31, but it’s said that there are 400 billion in the Milky Way alone.

There's another multimedia artist named Tom Sewell, although his works are vastly different. Are you familiar with him? A Tom Sewell x Tom Sewell collaboration would be something else.

I totally am aware of him (through Googling my own name—cool). He seems like a really great guy. Living in Hawaii and swimming in the Pacific every day is close to my vision of what success might mean. A collaboration would be an extraordinary opportunity, I'm sure there's a lot I could learn from him.

The Pineapple Illustration for Bompas & Parr 

On Holiday (photographic print) 

Tom Sewell’s psychedelic works can be viewed on his website and his blog. Definitely worth both the clicks.

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