The artists behind Illuminate Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens exhibition

Electronic music heavyweight Robin Fox is taking over the rainforest enclosure while Jethro Woodward’s music will lead audiences along the garden path.

Electronic music heavyweight Robin Fox in action. Picture by Diego Figueroa

Composer and audiovisual artist Robin Fox is “appalled” at how many people believe they can’t make music.

“You absolutely can,” he says. “The beauty of electronic music … is that the instruments help you.”

As founding director of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, Fox oversees a vast collection of almost 1000 electronic music ­instruments, from a 1930s theremin (an instrument that creates an electromagnetic field that allows it to be played without ­contact) that was made by Leon Theremin himself to contem­porary synthesisers. This “living collection” is available to anyone to explore via programs and subscription access, furthering MESS’s mission to “empower all people to build an enriched life through music”.

“We like to demystify the creative process,” he says. “I have become quite cynical about the music industry … I think (it has) been guilty over hundreds of years of creating a romance mythology around the idea of genius with idols and heroes that really precludes people from connecting with their creative side … creating an impossible dream out of what should be a fundamental human pastime.”

Robin Fox is part of Illuminate Adelaide’s centrepiece: Night Visions

Fox has worked for decades across experimental electronic composition and is renowned globally for audiovisual performances and immersive laser installations that play across space and surface. This year, he’s part of Illuminate Adelaide’s centrepiece: Night Visions, an after-dark takeover of the Adelaide Botanic Garden that will also feature installations by Chris Petridis (who is also the associate creative director), Craig Walsh, Amelia Kosminsky and Jayden Sutherland. Musical director Jethro Woodward will draw audiences through the gardens with a single cohesive score. Previous festival centrepieces have included Fire Gardens by France’s Compagnie Carabosse (2024) and Resonate by Canada’s Moment Factory (2023).

Night Visions marks the first time the festival has produced its main attraction with an almost entirely Australian team.

“It’s a real privilege to be working at this scale as an artist in Australia,” he says. “There’s been a trust deficit with Australian artists, historically, that cultural cringe. We’re still combating that sensibility, so this feels like a momentous thing.”

A mock-up of Night Visions

He admires the risk and faith placed in artists to produce an immersive “journey”, directed by Petridis with creative directors Rachael Azzopardi and Lee Cumberlidge. Fox’s installation, held within Night Visions, is titled Canopy and will play out in the ­Bicentennial Conservatory, a shell-shaped rainforest enclosure. It will be an immersive, laser-based illumination piece highlighting sections of the indoor rainforest.

“Technological interventions incorporate but accentuate the gardens,” says Fox, who has also made the audio for Canopy. “It’s an incredible melding of organic and ­inorganic.”

It’s a balance, Fox says, between making a visually and sonically stunning experience while ensuring people don’t stop too long, and making art that speaks to everybody. He is no stranger to unusual canvases. Much like his 2023 work Icon, a 50th anniversary commission for the Sydney Opera House, and Beacon, a monumental light show over Hobart for Mona Foma 2022, Night Visions is sprawling and speculative.

“The whole work itself won’t be a known quantity until we’re standing and experiencing it,” he says.

“I love the ephemerality of that.”

Fox’s passion for analog instruments and the audiovisual evolved from the 1990s during his time in digital production, when he found computers musically lacking.

“I was making music on the same device that I did my tax and all my correspondence,” he says. “What the analog world offers is the ability to sculpt directly with voltage … I found myself returning to my ears rather than my eyes. If you have to make the sound from scratch … the sounds you create are much more unique and they have something of you in it.”

He shifted into the visual space seeking that “virtuosity” that exists in live performance in what he describes as a “contract with the audience”. “When somebody walks on stage with a violin, there’s four strings and a human and an audience can understand what’s possible,” Fox says.

“When they exceed (that), they achieve virtuosity.” But when a musician walks on stage with a laptop, there is no visible instrument to master, no vibration to shape.

This is where Fox’s “mechanical synaesthesia” fills the gap with vibrational sculptures of sound.

“It’s the connection between the voltage you’re hearing and the voltage you’re seeing,” he says.

“Before your brain has time to be cognisant of what’s happening, the connection’s made between sound and image, you’re beguiled or seduced by this relationship.”

Fox is a master of affective and altered states of wonder. In Triptych (2022) he used laser projections to fill a 3D space with a trance-inducing visualisation of voltage, from glitchy shudders to moments of euphoria. He performed this award-winning piece internationally, most recently as the Melbourne Recital Centre’s artist in residence.

But Fox composes other works of audiovisual synthesis. For Rising, Fox and long-time collaborator, choreographer Stephanie Lake, staged The Chronicles, a contemporary dance charting a human being’s life from womb to tomb. It featured his electro-acoustic score with a children’s choir and lone baritone. He and Lake have a longstanding artistic symbiosis and have partnered on 20 productions across 15 years.

“Music and dance being somatic forms, they’re so inter­woven,” he says.

Soon, electronic music will be at the centre of Melbourne’s cultural conversation. Fox is in the midst of moving MESS from the current site in North Melbourne to a new home in the atrium at Federation Square. The Studio is nearly 10 years old but the move will allow it to share the rich history of electronic music like never before.

“We’re going from zero foot traffic per annum to hundreds and thousands of foot traffic per annum, at the end of every train line in the centre of town,” he says. “It’s a massive experiment.”

As a charitable organisation, its donor fundraising goal of $250,000 a year will allow it to stay for (and hopefully beyond) the three-year lease. Much of the funding MESS receives from Creative Australia and Creative Victoria, Fox says, is to support programs rather than curatorial management. But this immense living collection, he says, must be used and maintained to stay alive.

“It’s a radical proposition in the museum space,” he says. “If you don’t use electronic collections, they will perish … they’re musical instruments, they still have a lot to say.”

The new dedicated teaching space in Federation Square is a “game-changing proposition” that will allow MESS to expand artist-led teaching and academic crossover. Fox plans to work with Federation Square’s programming team for public events, and with the City of Melbourne in an upcoming talk series.

As part of his MRC residency, Fox will present a lecture for the 50th anniversary of La Trobe University’s music department, where he studied composition, including an almost complete studio reconstruction of instruments from the first composition lab.

Public outreach stands to strengthen Australia’s experimental and electronic music capabilities, which Fox says already have a strong reputation abroad.

“We have a maverick and iconoclastic sensibility,” Fox says. “We’re pretty dismissive of tradition … we tend to innovate.”

But Fox believes we also need to see the arts as something that is essential to the nation.

“Unfortunately, the arts have been characterised as a culturally elite pastime and the arts itself has contributed to that,” he says. “The creation of a rich cultural environment through the arts is essential to the wellbeing of the culture … but to give people ­access to the arts, you have to subsidise it. Then the idea is, it’s not paying for itself therefore it has no value. That’s a toxic proposition.

“We need to talk about the arts (for) the benefit it can have to the net happiness of our society. You can’t put a monetary figure on that.

“(It’s) human connection at a time when we need a lot more empathy,” he says. “We’re trying to spread that utopian manifesto as far as we can.”

Canopy is showing as part of Night Visions at the Adelaide Botanic Garden from July 2 to 20. Tickets at www.illuminateadelaide.com