The AV manager at the Royal Academy of Arts in London became a part of the creative team during a recent art exhibition. Benji Fox talks to Paul Milligan.
"There’s never been a plan, but I’ve always followed my interests," is how Benji Fox sums up his AV career so far, and it’s all the more interesting for it. After a short spell at art school, Fox found himself ‘going up and down ladders’ as a lighting tech at a busy local theatre in the UK.
After making the sideways move to sound engineer and spending time doing that, he felt the urge to return to education. Fox found a course in Sound Arts and Design, at the University of the Arts London. “When I started studying there, I realised I knew little about sound art, but I knew I’d found my people,” he says.
After graduating he instigated several exploratory spatial audio projects and spent time freelancing as a live-sound engineer. With a new family came the need for a more permanent career, and he joined the Museum of London as an events technician. “I was there for two years and we often instigated trying out new things. I decided I would live stream an event and I was the only technician that had a bit of knowledge about doing that at the time. We did interesting things like having diverse sound mixes from different activities and using multi-cameras. I realised one of my skills was in system design, I had an affinity with complex systems whilst also wanting to make things as robust as I could. On the other side, I was into quite complicated musical systems, programming software and modular synthesis. They felt quite separate, but it was at this time I realised the skill set was the very similar.”
Both these skills would come into play in his next role. Fox then moved to a management position at the Royal Academy of the Arts in central London. Fox now heads up a team covering the day-to-day events, managing the different galleries requirements for AV, broadcast or lighting technology. It is at this point where the story diverts from the norm. Fox’s role, as previously explained, is an AV manager, he provides the AV, he’s a facilitator if an artist has a specific requirement, but for the current Michael Craig-Martin retrospective (which ran from September to December 2024), Fox was a key part of the creative process.
How did this come about? “It comes down to the Royal Academy being unusual in the first instance,” he explains. “My team usually wouldn’t be involved in the curatorial process, we usually come in when they’ve defined what the artwork’s going to be and what their multimedia elements are. This one was unusual because the curator was also our chief exec [Axel Rüger]. Because it’s a solo show, he was working directly with Michael [Craig-Martin] on the inception and it was Axel’s idea to create an immersive work, he’d seen The Outernet and a couple of other things and wanted us to try and create something like that.”
Some of Craig-Martin’s 60-year catalogue of work includes digital work, so Fox was invited to look over those to form what would become an immersive space called Cosmos, to sit alongside the paintings. He takes up the story: “In that first conversation we started talking about LED, could we have LED tiles on the ceiling? I looked into the practicalities but quickly dismissed it from a heatflow and weight perspective. I was an advocate for what projection could do. How could we make the room work for 360-degree projection?”
Fox had been made aware of a small body, 20,000 lumens Epson projector that was about to be released into the market and saw the opportunity to collaborate with the manufacturer on this project. Fox knew he had a large gallery space to fill (9m x 6m) for Cosmos and was keen to test the limits. “It wouldn’t have worked if it was HD projection,” he says. “We wanted to push technology as much as possible. I was looking at lenses and lens-throw calculations, to see whether you could get projectors (at a 5m distance) to face each other and fill each wall. We didn’t actually know for sure until we put the projectors up, there was a little bit of risk.”
That isn’t where Fox’s creative involvement ends, because of his experimentations with audio in the past, he was keen to explore audio for the exhibition too. “In that first meeting I said, ‘what about sound?’ they went, ‘hmm, well, I guess there should be sound’, they hadn’t really thought about it.” Fox was initially reticent to put his own name forward to provide the audio for the project, “There was about three weeks before I put my hat in the ring where I should have said something, but I sat on that decision, because I work at the RA and staff tend not to have their names in the galleries. What if I didn’t deliver? Imagine if nobody liked it, if I was creatively dismissed. I knew that nobody else was as close to the development of the project, and I felt I had a profound understanding of what they were looking for, and I had a history of spatial sound composition.”
Fox pitched the idea of writing and composing the music for Cosmos, and Daniel Jackson, an animator who has collaborated with Michael Craig-Martin for more than 20 years on his video pieces, and Michael Craig-Martin, both thought it was a great idea, and Fox was given the go-ahead. “Having spoken to Michael since, he said that he
had an intuition that I wouldn’t put myself in a position where I would fail, so he knew he was going to get a lot out of me. It was quite shrewd of him,” explains Fox, who was given early test animations to help compose the music while the rest were being finished.
Fox explains his process: “One of the early animations was of multiple children’s and sports balls bouncing around, we knew they would hit the edge of the screen and hit each other, so you have impact sounds. It was one of the last things I finished because it was so technically complex to do it. I felt from the beginning I shouldn’t use real world sounds, there would be no real-world instruments or recorded sounds, I would use synthesis. The conceit being that Michael’s images are two-dimensional images, representations of a real objects, so the sound design wouldn’t bring those objects into reality.”
The Cosmos installation used four Epson 20,000 lumens 4K projectors, in fact Fox was one of the first in the UK to gets his hands on this model. On the audio side, Fox used PMC amplifiers and four different sizes of PMC speakers, all mounted in the walls, as well as a hidden PMC subwoofer. “We have four separate video players with four projectors, and 12 channels of audio. The initial idea was that everything, sound and video would communicate via a timecode, that didn’t work so we had to come up with another solution. It plays every time, every day and has done for months. I feel rewarded with the reaction to the creative side, and the sound design. But also, as I don’t think you would choose to put together a system like this, it is unique. The fact that it’s been so robust is the real success.”
How would Fox know when he found the right fit between music and animation? “It’s very easy to know when something is wrong, but you know if something is right, so if it works you then build on that. You have to throw quite a lot at it.”
Putting on any show can be a stressful process, but when you add in you are writing and composing the soundtrack too, against a deadline, at the same time, it has taken a huge effort by Fox to deliver both. How did he find the whole process? “I definitely felt the pressure. It’s an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It’s an international stage, there’s thousands of people that come through the doors. For the sound design I can’t only follow my own taste, you’re making something for the artwork and for the artist. That’s quite a difficult position to be in, to feel like it has enough of yourself, but fulfils the criteria of it working. You’re thinking about the audience, the artist, about my position as being a member of staff.”
How has Fox found being on the ‘other side’ of the equation for once? “There is a big difference. Being a service provider is often thankless. Being on the creative side there is praise.”
Would he go through it all again? “Oh, absolutely. After my second child was born I had to pack away some of those creative urges, and now this project has opened up that creative valve. I’ve got a couple of exciting projects coming up. For a while I was feeling somewhat creatively fulfilled within my position, there’s a lot of creativity in system design and much creative thought within many facets of AV work, which I like, but I now realise I need to take on more creatively rewarding projects.”