Suhas Kambhampati

I am a London-based multidisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher working with moving images and sound, explored through the materiality of mirrors, projection, and water. My practice conceptually begins with reflection and refraction, not as visual effects, but as a method for thinking. Mirrors act as thresholds that fold digital space into physical experience. Water becomes a second lens, a volatile surface that holds an image only briefly before it slips, breaks, and returns as something else. I build immersive experiences where audiences' perceptions are challenged as their attention/focus is split between screen and reality. This is experienced through light and sound where I use water as a filter, or an environment, as an infrastructure to distort, warp and manipulate images. 

 

My work starts from the systems we inhabit every day and the ordinary behaviours we repeat almost without noticing. Scrolling, saving, posting, forgetting. I am interested in what these gestures do to memory, attention, and self image once they are shaped by social media platforms. Within an attention economy where images travel as poor images, compressed and circulated until reproducibility matters more than meaning, I use the templatization of content on social media platforms as infrastructures of feeling. 

 

Distortion is a diagnostic, not an aesthetic. My installations take image datasets as raw material and translate them into a live optical system. I fragment thousands of online images into small tiles and project them onto a mirror that holds a shallow layer of water, forming an ever-changing mosaic. Beneath the water, transducers driven by sound frequencies generate vibration and ripples. As the frequency shifts, the water surface becomes an active lens: fragments briefly sharpen into legible detail, then dissolve as the ripples pull them apart. At certain thresholds the projection collapses into interference patterns and the mechanics of transmission become visible, turning signal and noise into the subject.

 

Audience interaction is built into the circuit. Viewers can tune between different datasets and adjust the frequency driving the transducers. The result is both a light sculpture in water and a transformed projection, seen through reflection in the mirror and refraction through the moving surface. The installation makes the feed itself feel unstable: images don’t “arrive” cleanly, they arrive through a medium that reveals how easily meaning breaks.

​

Alongside installation work, my film practice uses practical staging and minimal manipulation to explore the cognitive split of living between screen and world, where attention is repeatedly pulled apart and reassembled, often using TouchDesigner and Max/MSP for real-time image and sound processing. I am particularly interested in sampling and reprocessing low-quality images, social media reels, and datasets as raw material, treating circulation itself as a form of authorship and collapse. 

​

I completed an MA in Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Film Art at the University of Mumbai. Recent work includes The Daily Scroll, selected for publication in London Art Collective’s ArtEvol 2025 catalogue.