'Space Between Images: Associative Perception; the Making of Meaning in Installation Practice'

Introduction

I am interested in how individual perceptual and cognitive differences shape meaning in spatial installations. A space exists between two images in a 2D film edit. We cannot physically enter it, yet we often derive meaning from it. This principle extends beyond cinema and appears across different forms of creative expression. In music, it is the silence between notes; in moving image, it is the relationship between fragments that create a greater whole. Meaning is not necessarily contained within an individual image, sound or object, but emerges through the associations we make between them.

The cut invites the spectator to establish relationships between images, drawing on memory, expectation, and personal experience. I am interested in what happens when that space is no longer confined to the screen, but becomes an environment we move through.

My art and research led me to question how differently we perceive and interpret creative environments as an artist with AuDHD and dyslexia. I’m interested in how neurodivergence shapes differences in perception and affects the associations we make and the narratives we construct. If two people move through the same installation, encountering the same images, sounds, and objects, will they experience the same narrative? Or will their individual ways of perceiving the world lead them to construct entirely different outcomes? 

I trained at art college before going on to study at film school, specialising in post-production editing, fascinated by the language of cinematic editing and wanting to bring it back into my film installation practice. At the time, I followed my curiosity; looking back, I can see a clear progression in my work through my interests. I was interested in subliminal association in non-linear editing and how it could provoke association, constructing narratives that weren't necessarily linear or explicit. This led me to question how differently individual spectators experience creative work. If our memories, experiences and ways of perceiving the world are unique, then surely the meanings we construct from the same sequence of images must also differ. This curiosity has increasingly drawn me to questions of neurodiversity, perception, and the possibility of developing a more individualised language of spatial montage.

Moving image remains central to my work, but I also paint, sculpt and craft sculptures. I believe in the processes of creative making: the resistance of materials, mixing pigments, unexpected possibilities within construction and the mistakes we make and learn from. The smell of oil paint, the unique imperfections of a brushstroke. I don't see these processes as separate from digital technologies. My installations bring these elements together. In my practice, a soldering iron sits beside my paintbrush. I see no separation between traditional methods of making and digital technologies; both are materials through which I explore, construct, and question the relationships between images, objects, and space.

I am interested in more than simply establishing whether neurodivergent people experience art differently. I want to understand how differences in perception, attention, and associative thinking might offer new possibilities for spatial montage, building installations that audiences can move through and interact with. By observing these encounters, inviting participants to reflect on their experiences, and examining the outcomes through my own creative enquiry, I hope to understand how meaning is formed through spatial narrative. 

Central to my research is how individual perceptual and cognitive differences shape conscious and subconscious associations through which spectators construct meaning within spatially edited fine art installations.

We already recognise differences in sensory experience through practices such as sensory mapping, which can help audiences anticipate and navigate an exhibition's or environment's sensory qualities. However, while existing research has explored sensory processing, perception, and the experience of built environments among neurodivergent individuals, we still need to understand better how these differences shape the associations and narratives constructed within spatial art installations. By exploring this relationship, I hope to consider how artists, architects and designers might approach the spatial editing of environments in more inclusive ways, recognising that individuals do not necessarily perceive, navigate or construct meaning from the same space in the same way.

Within my practice, spatial montage incorporates sculpture, painting, software, circuit boards, sensors, projections, and sound. I plan to develop interactive installations using real-time sensor data and custom software, allowing spectators to influence the environment dynamically. These elements are not separate disciplines, but interconnected materials through which I construct an environment. The spectator is no longer confined to a fixed sequence of images, as in conventional cinema, but is free to move between objects, images, and sounds, establishing their own relationships and associations. Their movement, attention, memories, and individual ways of perceiving the environment become part of the editing process itself.

Fig 1 Matthew Robinson and Peyvand Sadeghian, Apolune: Systems Normal (2026). Audience members interact with a handmade Mission Control console incorporating moving image, electronic controls and a sculptural diorama: solo exhibition, APT Gallery, Deptford, London, February 2026.

Cinematic montage to spatial editing

Kuleshov’s theory holds that meaning can derive from the relationship between images rather than within a single shot; Eisenstein developed montage to explore these elements. I want to investigate what happens when this theory is applied in a physical space. An individual may interpret sound uniquely and move physically through a space, forming different associations with images. The artist can create situations, but cannot dictate exactly how an individual may feel within them.

In writing on media installation, Kate Mondloch examines how screens shape the spectator’s bodily and spatial experience; Victor Burgin similarly considers film's fragmented afterlife in memory. These ideas help me distinguish between an edit I construct and the edit a spectator experiences. I call this emerging methodology associative spatial editing: the composition of relationships between moving image, sound, painting, sculpture, architecture and embodied movement, in which spectators generate their own interpretations of an artist’s interpretation.

My Master's dissertation at Edinburgh College of Art, ‘The Road Movie and the Inflatable American Dream’, explored the effects of hyperreality on a tourist (myself) travelling across the United States. During my road trip through America, I became increasingly aware that my experience of the landscape was inseparable from memories of films I had previously watched. 

Travelling through America, I was struck by how familiar so many places seemed, despite never having visited them before. I recognised landscapes, streets and buildings from films I had watched over the years. In America, Jean Baudrillard writes, “The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western, the city a screen of signs and formulas.” This was very close to my own experience. I began to question whether I was seeing these places for what they were, or through the films and images I already carried in my memory. This became an important part of my thinking about associative editing, and how our experiences influence the meanings we construct from what we see.

Developing a material and spatial practice

In my film installation Glacial Waters (2018), presented in Almaty, Kazakhstan, following my research fellowship in Berlin at ZK/U Berlin - Centre for Art and Urbanistics, I worked with multiple edited film timelines projected onto water and transparent surfaces (projection scrim). Melting glacial ice, reflected images, sound, and the installation's architecture brought different temporalities into contact. The work could not be understood from one fixed viewpoint; the spectator’s position altered the composition.

Fig. 2 Matthew Robinson, Glacial Waters (2018). Multi-screen film installation, Almaty, Kazakhstan. Moving images projected across water and transparent surfaces.

In Following Streams: Coppermill Stream (2026), I explored the waterways of east London by canoe, documenting a journey towards a secluded jetty on Coppermill Stream. The project began with a chance encounter with a man called Tony, a retired crossword enthusiast, in a cafe beside the River Lea, and a conversation. 

Tony told me he collected rubbish from the river and built a secluded jetty and hut from materials he had recovered there. Situated along Coppermill Stream, a tributary of the River Lea, the jetty was accessible only by canoe. He had created a small haven away from the city's hustle, somewhere he could immerse himself in nature, escape urban noise, and quietly complete his crossword puzzles.

This conversation and chance encounter became the starting point for the work, with the crossword emerging as a compositional device in which individual words suggested scenes, memories, and associative connections rather than following a conventional linear narrative. I presented the resulting film alongside a handmade sculptural crossword with water channels. By bringing the moving image into dialogue with a physical object, I wanted to explore how the spectator might connect the two, and how the sculpture could shape or redirect their interpretation of the film.

Fig 3 Matthew Robinson, Following Streams: Coppermill Stream (2026). Canoe fitted with filming and sound recording equipment during the development of the project

Fig 4 Matthew Robinson, Following Streams: Coppermill Stream (2026). Film still showing the crossword as a visual and narrative device, with individual words informing the associative editing of the moving image.

Making is central to these works. I paint in oils, construct sculptures from wood, metal and recovered materials, and increasingly experiment with older synthesisers and electronic soundscapes. Learning to solder is becoming integral to the way I build sculptures. Circuitry, switches, imperfect analogue sounds and handmade surfaces are not merely equipment supporting the image; they are part of the artwork’s material language. This has led me towards questions of material agency and embodied perception, where meaning develops through the encounter between a body and an object rather than through representation alone.

Apolune: Systems Normal

Apolune: Systems Normal, co-created with Peyvand Sadeghian, reimagines NASA’s Apollo 11 archive through our experiences as two autistic artists. I perform as a Mission Control technician while Peyvand performs as an astronaut travelling towards the Moon. The distance between Earth and the spacecraft, and the limitations of historical communication systems, became a metaphor for how we interpreted and communicated within our own relationship (we are also partners). The archive provided a shared language, but never a single agreed meaning.

I constructed retrofuturist Mission Control desks with monitors, buttons, switches and interactive mechanisms. Spectators could press controls to select pathways through archival footage, while TouchDesigner processed Theremin signals to trigger audiovisual material. The work mixed new and old technology. One desk featured a miniature landscape inspired by Dungeness, revealed through a mechanical opening and equipped with contact microphones. The performance took place within an installation through which spectators could move and interact, encountering different fragments according to their choices.

Fig 5 Matthew Robinson and Peyvand Sadeghian, Apolune: Systems Normal (2026). Installation views and audience interaction, APT Gallery, Deptford, London—mixed media installation incorporating sculptural structures, archival moving images, projection mapping, sound and interactive elements.

During Apolune: Systems Normal’s development, we travelled to Dungeness to film our interpretations of astronaut training and to investigate the nearby acoustic mirrors, known as the listening ears. Built as an early form of radar, these concrete structures were designed to concentrate distant aircraft sounds. I flew a drone around the mirrors and used Polycam to process the imagery and generate three-dimensional models through photogrammetry. I then imported these into Blender, animated them and incorporated the moving images into a Mission Control desk.

We also made sculptural versions of the listening ears where spectators could place their heads, experiencing the relationship between concave form, bodily position, and sound. Site recordings made with Fieldtone’s Weaver (Fieldtone were one of our sponsors for the APT gallery exhibition) were mixed with NASA archival audio. The acoustic mirrors became historical objects, digital reconstructions, handmade sculptures, and soundscapes at once. The collision of these forms produced associations between early acoustic detection, space travel, listening and distance that could not be reduced to a single narrative.

CRIPtic Arts and Artsadmin supported this work, including a sold-out performance at the Barbican and a subsequent solo exhibition at APT Gallery. Experimental instruments and equipment, supplied through support from KOMA Elektronik (also a sponsor) and Fieldtone, further extended the relationship between physical gesture, sound, and unpredictable electronic behaviour. These are not incidental technical details; they show how an installation can invite spectators to help construct its meaning.

Listening, perception and individual difference

Experimental sound culture has also shaped my thinking, particularly through work encountered at Cafe OTO in Dalston and in independent publications on handmade instruments, improvisation, and visual collage. Salomé Voegelin’s account of listening as an active, subjective process is valuable here. A sound may become foreground for one spectator and remain peripheral for another; the same recording may transform the meaning of an archival image when heard in a different physical setting.

I am autistic, have ADHD and am dyslexic. These experiences, along with more than a decade of teaching art and moving image, have made me attentive and interested in how people approach information differently. Sometimes the route into the information, rather than the information itself, is the barrier. I do not assume a uniform neurodivergent response. Instead, I am interested in individual perceptual variability: how attentional salience, sensory processing, memory and implicit associative processing may shape what a spectator notices and connects.

Clinical and cognitive research into neurodiversity offers helpful concepts, but I feel that a practice-based PhD and artistic enquiry could test them. No research has examined how neurodiverse perception can differ within subconscious association and spatial editing. Researchers have studied these domains individually, but no work has brought them together within a practice-led PhD.

Work on autism across exteroceptive and interoceptive domains demonstrates why sensory experience cannot be treated as a single, simple measure. Multisensory integration, embodied cognition, and predictive processing offer ways to ask how sound, image, touch, and expectation interact. 

My aim is not to diagnose spectators or divide them into fixed categories, but to explore how perceptual difference might become an artistic resource.

Towards responsive spatial editing

For the PhD, I propose to make new installations that compare fixed audiovisual relationships with deliberately interactive and, later, physiologically responsive compositions. Wearable devices, potentially discreet rings or smartwatches, could provide consenting participants’ bodily signals as inputs to projection, sound or sculptural mechanisms. I have approached Oura about possible support, but we have not agreed on a partnership, and we still need to establish if this is technically possible.

Physiological measurements cannot reveal an individual's thoughts or unconscious associations. However, they may provide a limited account of bodily activity when considered alongside observation, voluntary associative mapping, interviews, and interaction records. UCL research on interoception and interpersonal synchrony in live theatre suggests productive possibilities for methodological dialogue, while also underscoring the need to distinguish measured behaviour from interpretation. Consent, data minimisation and accessible participation would be essential to any study.

I am interested in doing my research at Slade because my inquiry would be practice-led; the institute seems to encourage moving image, performance, and experimentation, as well as dialogue across UCL departments. This offers me a setting where artistic decisions and questions about perception can inform one another.

Ultimately, I want to develop associative spatial editing as an artistic method that acknowledges the spectator as an active participant in meaning-making. The space between images becomes a physical and perceptual space: one that each person can enter, negotiate, and understand differently.

1. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

2. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), p. 56.

3. Matthew Robinson, Glacial Waters (2018), film installation, Almaty, Kazakhstan. Documentation available at: https://www.matthewrobinson.art/glacial-waters (accessed 11 October 2026).

4. Matthew Robinson, Following Streams: Coppermill Stream (2026), experimental film and sculptural installation, London. Artwork documentation: https://www.matthewrobinson.art/following-streams

5.  Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

6.  Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010).

7.  I. Proff, G. L. Williams, L. Quadt and S. N. Garfinkel, ‘Sensory Processing in Autism across Exteroceptive and Interoceptive Domains’, Psychology & Neuroscience, 15, no. 2 (2022), 105–130, https://doi.org/10.1037/pne0000262 records.

8. Y. Sun, D. A. Greaves, G. Orgs, A. F. de C. Hamilton, S. Day and J. A. Ward, ‘Using Wearable Sensors to Measure Interpersonal Synchrony in Actors and Audience Members during a Live Theatre Performance’, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 7, no. 1 (2023), article 27, https://doi.org/10.1145/3580781.

Bibliography

• Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2004

• Eisenstein, Sergei M. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949

• Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshov on Film: Writings. Edited and translated by Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

• Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000

• Mondloch, Kate. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010

• Proff, I., G. L. Williams, L. Quadt and S. N. Garfinkel. ‘Sensory Processing in Autism across Exteroceptive and Interoceptive Domains’. Psychology & Neuroscience 15, no. 2 (2022): 105–130. 

Link: https://doi.org/10.1037/pne0000262.

• Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992

• Sun, Y., D. A. Greaves, G. Orgs, A. F. de C. Hamilton, S. Day and J. A. Ward. ‘Using Wearable Sensors to Measure Interpersonal Synchrony in Actors and Audience Members during a Live Theatre Performance’. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 7, no. 1 (2023): article 27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3580781

• Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum, 2010

Selected Artworks Referenced

• Robinson, Matthew, Nathan, Benjamin Glacial Waters (2018). Film installation, Almaty, Kazakhstan. Exhibition documentation available at:  

Link: https://www.matthewrobinson.art/glacial-waters (

Accessed: 11 October 2026).

• Robinson, Matthew, Following Streams: Coppermill Stream (2026). Experimental film and sculptural installation, London. Artwork documentation available at: 

Link: https://www.matthewrobinson.art/following-streams

• Robinson, Matthew and Sadeghian, Peyvand, Apolune: Systems Normal (2026). Mixed media performance and interactive installation. Solo exhibition, APT Gallery, Deptford, London, February 2026. 

Artwork documentation available at: 

Link: https://www.matthewrobinson.art (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Further research and contextual reading

Publications and artistic contexts

• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010

• Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998

• Jordan, M., and G. Rizzioli. ‘Introducing Open Montage: Material Performativity in Urban Media Configurations in Space’. NECSUS 13, no. 1 (2024): 74–96

• Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970.

• Cafe OTO. OTOHON: independent publishing on the visual practices of experimental musicians 

Link: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/shop/category/otohon/

• The Wire. Independent magazine of experimental music and sound. 

Link: https://www.thewire.co.uk/

London research communities and resources

• UCL, Slade School of Fine Art: research in media, performance and installation. 

Link:https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research-innovation/case-studies/2014/dec/materialising-digital-commercial-social-and-cultural-benefits-new-artistic-forms

• UCL, Clinical and Affective Neuroscience research: interoception, bodily signals and cognition. 

Link:https://www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-sciences/icn/research/research-groups/clinical-and-affective-neuroscience

• University of the Arts London, CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice). 

Link:https://www.arts.ac.uk/research/research-centres/creative-research-in-sound-arts-practice-crisap

• UCL, Bartlett Research, Interactive Architecture Lab: investigates environments that sense, compute and respond to people. Its installations combine physical structures, electronics, sensors and audience interaction. 

Link: https://www.interactivearchitecture.org/lab-projects

• Cafe OTO, Dalston: experimental music, sound art and associated publications. 

Link: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/