If you have been to the Opening page you will be familiar with the various kinds of video. So here below are some further examples of current work: Ikons, Haiku, Etudes and Opus. For more examples of current work, check out the videos on Openings, Past Projects and Collaboration.

For information on the HARK Collective’s most recent project, Asylum Diaries, visit the Opus section of the website.

Ikons are sounded glimpses of some feature of our environing world, small passing miniatures.

Haiku are short, usually 4 minute, invitations to dwell a little longer with sound and images.

Etudes are longer pieces which take a particular subject or theme, for example deep geological time in Cosmosis or link a series of visual elements — light, surface, pattern — in others. I have finalised one, Cosmosis and am working on three others at the moment and they are all being worked on by composers to develop the sound tracks for them. I show them here silent/unscored to give a sense of the visual materials. Flow has a number of episodes, from Fall and naturalistic beginning at the Hermitage Falls at Dunkeld, to Object, rocks. to and explores movements, flows of water, cloud. patterns. FishEye River is a study of the surface of the River Tay whereby the world is reflected on and in the surface, depths appear, light create ripples, and what can be seen o the banks seems to be what a fish might see. GrassRustWind is a compilation of shots of organic movement, first in fields where the uniformity of planting feels regiments and only lightly disturbed by breezes; a central interlude is a visit to a farm machinery graveyard where the mechanical beasts lie rusting and disused, cockpits are deserted, grass grows around deflated tyres, and clanking machines are silenced; the third episode tries to capture the wayward and unpreditable movement of the wind running through and away through the grass, the final shot is a memorial image — poppies come unbidden year after year, nature is always naturing, and post covid this seems like an optimistic thought.

But first, Cosmosis, the full version of the Haiku: Porous which opened this website. Here the sound and images take us into deep geological time (see the story of the piece in Sounding Stones in Past Projects). Cosmosis moves from the green surface that is disturbed by the scraping and striking of stones, to rhythmic rocking cascades of scree, to volcanic grindings, through meteor showers, tectonic explosions and an immersion in the creation of the sounded matter. Cosmos and osmosis — our composition as star dust and our waking porosity to the world imagined as the image/sound membrane where mind mingles with matter. The water surfaces bounce light around the sounds. Our immersion in the fluid molecules is like a sensory conglomeration prefigured in the small interstices of porous stone. A whirlpool is created by the struggles of a wasp caught in the surface tension of the water and it spins itself deeper and deeper into oblivion. The ‘Big Bang’ was actually silent, and here we feel its energy rippling out as waves, becoming sound. Your ear-drum attuned to the rock beats in a regularity like a summoning bell, and sound recedes into deep space as an echo. The hum of the cosmos: hairs of the inner ear. The ear drum moves less that an atom to hear this world. This is what I try to create — Atmosphere, through sensory elements that constellate into some idea or impression of the world.

Asylum Diaries

The HARK Collective’s most recent project, Asylum Diaries, is in four parts: Exile; Running; Capture and Witness. The first three parts are an imaginative, sensory narrative of a refugee journey, beginning on the seashore, going into exile, then arriving in a strange country, being pursued, running and being captured, imprisoned, maltreated, yet surviving to continue the journey. These parts are made as the memories of a traveler using an iPhone, capturing fragments of the journey and producing a chronicle that helps us imagine their experience. In the fourth part, Witness, the atmosphere changes from a sensory narrative to a realist documentary approach, narrated by the Angel of History. It includes images of the Nakba and ruined villages from the work of Ahmad Al-Bazz a photographer from the West Bank who has collaborated with us on our work. The Palestinian genocide here is central in Witness and also to our universal understanding of violence and inhumanity. Witness asks us to do just that, to honour the dead and the living and points towards ‘survivance’ – a word that express the emotional and intellectual burden of living with and after these traumas, and the refusal to be de-humanised by them. The piece lasts just under 1 hour and will be premiered on 1 November 2025.

1. Information about the event

Asylum Diaries will receive its first performance on Saturday, 1 November at 3.00pm at the University of Glasgow’s Advanced Research Centre in the Seminar Suite.

2. The Programme Note

ASYLUM DIARIES

By Huw Lloyd-Richards

The HARK Collective

The Hark project is a Collective of video artists, musicians and actors who create collaborative video-sound-music-text art works for recording and performance.

 Asylum Diaries

Asylum Diaries is in four Atmospheres: Exile; Running; Capture and Witness. The first three Atmospheres make up an imaginary, sensory narrative of a refugee journey. This journey begins on the seashore – going into exile then on land in a strange country, being pursued, running and being captured, imprisoned. In confinement we are maltreated, yet survive to continue the journey. These first three Atmospheres are the memories of a traveler, using an iPhone, to record fragments of the journey, a memory scrapbook that helps us imagine this experience.

The fourth Atmosphere is called Witness. At this point, the register changes from a sensory narrative to a realist documentary approach. It is narrated by the Angel of History ­– a figure from the work of Walter Benjamin. It focusses on the Palestinian genocide but also has wider scope, seeking to understand the universal violence and inhumanity using images of ecocide and genocide from many genocides. It includes images of the Nakba and ruined villages from the work of Ahmad Al-Bazz, a photographer from the West Bank who has collaborated with us on our work.

Witness asks the question of how we can bear witness, and asks how can it be possible to survive and live with trauma, collective suffering, haunting memories, loss and displacement? It points to the honoring of the ‘voices’ of the dead. It points to resistance: towards ‘survivance’.

We have tried here to create an ‘imaginary of compassion’ to try to imagine the suffering of Palestinians. What right have we to attempt this, having no personal experience of it and being from our western culture? Our ‘witness’ is certainly at a comfortable distance from the reality. We offer our work in the hope that our attempt, though partial, will contribute, in some way, to our, and maybe others, understanding of the suffering of Palestinians.

Whilst working on Asylum diaries and particularly the last Atmosphere – Witness, a number of themes and concerns arose for us in our discussions, briefly shared below. A full discussion of these themes with source materials, plus the script of Witness and its list of references for the photo montage clips used in it is available on the HARK website – hark.org.uk and contacts can be made to huw@hark.org.uk. These themes pose some difficult questions.

Seven Reasons Why the Palestine-Israeli Conflict matters to us all.

Killing People

There is a categorical imperative, which is fundamental to human and civil life – that we should not kill one another. All ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ must be subject to intense ethical scrutiny. ‘Just War’ theories or other justifications of vengeance must be carefully explored.

Rights to Life: Destruction, Displacement and Erasure

Displacement and apartheid is the dispossession of home. Destruction of the land itself, its toxic poisoning, or ‘ecocide’, makes agriculture impossible. The destruction of family and civil life and the materials for culture and its artefacts is not collateral damage of a war - it is the very means by which war is being waged. The very basis of lived life is weaponised, and is a central part of the death-dealing process.

Desolation where no law applies: the uses of International Law; the failure of religion

When a sovereign power creates a state and place of ‘exception’ they tyrannically suspend laws, customs, rituals. No regulatory, ethical or juridical frames of reference are allowed to be applied to the territory that has been made a place and space of ‘exception’. This sealed off wasteland allows little contact with the external world, journalists are killed. The spectacle is then broadcast by satellites, to screens as a theatre of power, a warning. What is International Law in such a situation?

The AI killing machine

Gaza has become the laboratory for the development of a spectacle of digital warfare waged impersonally from a distance by algorithms with minimal and well defended operators with indifference. The spectacle on our screens is so immediate, vivid and fast moving and the war-gaming of the players is a new and potentially terrifying method of warfare. The gathering, information processing and the algorithmic calculus of target selection is de-humanised, ethically outsourced to the AI killing apparatus. No-one ‘[pulls the trigger’; it happens’ automatically because it is programmed, thus a strong psychological defence against the horror of killing intentions, and against responsibility and guilt is created. This scenario also creates the laboratory for military development to be sold across the world.

Controlling the Narrative and the Importance of Testimonies

The shaping of a vengeance justification narrative has proceeded. Selective slices of history are used to make claims to homeland. Biblical references are extracted and applied. The battle of definitions is stoked by constant contestation in the search for a conceptual purity. Complex descriptions are weaponised. The meanings of what should be the words of dialogue are polarised: ‘antisemitism’; ‘genocide’, ‘Zionism’; ‘Islamism’; ‘terrorism’, and become toxic and inflammatory. The proscribing of Palestinian organisations, conflating proper dissent with support for terrorism is a category error. To control the narrative, Palestinian writing and testimonies of lives and experiences are vitally important to have a voice and to tell their story. Art works have a part to play in this.

Trauma

Trauma is the cumulation of the stresses on mind, body, community and the possibility of survival. It is a state of chronic ‘post traumatic stress disorder’. Sufferers wake with a dread of continual pain, oppression injury and more suffering. Life itself becomes unbearable. Anxiety and its physical and mental aspects pervade every waking moment and indeed also those times of fitful semi-sleep that can be snatched. The world becomes malign, day and night merge into a liminal nightmare. This conflict and it horror is often referred to as ‘unimaginable’. Our work in Asylum Diaries is to try to create an ‘imagination of compassion’, to present sensory material that can evoke this concern.

“The Day After”: Suspension, Limbo and Purgatory

The political theatre of magically announcing ‘peace’ through an imposed ceasefire now leaves a state of exception in a post-apocalyptic limbo. People return to rubble, diseases spread, no water, no means of sustaining normal life has reappeared, nor is likely to soon. The pilgrimage home to desolation has to be made, to honour the dead to be in the place from whence we have come, where we once had a life. What will my house be worth now when the real estate reconstruction company comes calling? Who is helping reconstruction? ‘What will be reconstructed? Will it include the basis of a flourishing personal and family life, an economy, and civil society related to a coherent form of governance in a land that is recognised  as Palestinian.

‘The annihilation may end, but the occupation continues as it did before October 7th 2023. The blockade remains, settlements expand and daily oppression persists……we must reclaim our rituals: let plates return to tables, the road regain it calm on the way to school. People need life, nothing more. Gaza has endured pain, betrayal and neglect and deserves a real chance at living, a genuine one, not fragile ceasefires’

Sondos Saba, We return to gangs, bombs, rubble and Fear, Guardian Newspapers, 17/10/25.

_________

Biographies

Musicians

Bede Williams trained in brass bands in New Zealand and moved to Scotland in 2003 to study at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He currently works at the Laidlaw Music Centre in St Andrews. See www.bedewilliams.com for more information. His practice as an improvisor was established in 2010 when he led performances of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen for the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust which Michael Tumelty of The Herald described as ‘visionary’. He has subsequently released a wide variety of recordings with numerous collaborators and has developed a specialism of working in site-specific and interdisciplinary contexts.

Robin Mason is a freelance cellist and composer based in Fife, Coming from a core classical background, he has performed/composed/recorded in diverse fields: visual art (HARK, Fortsunlight Animation, Jane Brettle), many Theatre/Contemporary Dance companies including National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Dance Theatre, Matthew Bourne, Catherine Wheels. He is currently recording an album as part of exciting new folk band, Hegeduk, and is playing with the legendary Cauld Blast Orchestra.  Robin teaches cello at the Laidlaw Music Centre, St Andrews and Edinburgh Napier University. 

Actors

Mark Coleman is a veteran theatre actor and director. Mark has of late played historical luminaries such a philosopher David Hume, post-impressionist artist Paul Cezanne, film mogul Louis B Mayer, and Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Earlier this year he payed Otto Frank in ‘Dream of Anne Frank’, and the poet Giovanni Pascoli in The Badly-behaved Poet Society (Supernova), which will tour extensively in Scotland and Italy in 2026. Mark is currently President of the Glasgow Shakespeare Society

Ibrahim Bakhait is an Edinburgh based actor and since graduating from Glasgow Clyde College in 2017, has gone on to appear on stage and in film and television alike. He also has experience doing voice acting and has most recently appeared in a few commercials.

Wendy Barrett is an actor of Armenian descent based in the Scottish Borders. She studied English & Drama at Edinburgh University, and has acted extensively in theatre and film. Stage roles include Juliet's Nurse in ‘Romeo & Juliet’, M’Lynn in ‘Steel Magnolias’ and Hazel in Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘Wildest Dreams’. Films include 'Good Intentions', ‘Tommy’s Honour’ and ‘Patrick Swayze: Ghosts and Demons’. Wendy can currently be seen touring in her critically acclaimed one-woman show ‘Glimpses of You'.

Consultancy and Video editing

Jonathan Charles is an experienced filmmaker and creative app developer. He uses his deep knowledge of film, animation and CGI, to produce: cross-artform projects, digital films and engaging programmes for a wide variety of people. Moving confidently between creating large scale projections for theatre productions, to the smaller delights of apps on mobile devices. He is passionate about film and its power to facilitate change, both encouraging young people to make their own films and working with organisations who genuinely make a difference. 

Director and Writer

Huw Lloyd-Richards

Huw studied theology, has a PhD in Social Anthropology and was a Fellow of the Kings Fund in Leadership Development. His seminal paper ‘Ways of Listening’ led to the creation of HARK: Listening Research, at St Andrews University, where we are supported by the Music Centre. HARK projects have included: “An Ethnography of Listening” an exploration of ekphrasitic creative processes – a dialogical ‘libretto’ was created using 60 listeners’ responses to Errollyn Wallen’s piece, Photography; “Soundings” an exploration of ‘deep time’ which was performed by the percussionist Alex Waber on a lithophone constructed using 13 types of rock gathered from across Scotland, and is titled “Cosmosis”. A sound-music album was made –“HARK at the Silo” from improvisation in a resonant acoustic, a disused grain silo, and is available on Spotify. After Asylum Diaries, the HARK Collective will work on two further projects, ‘Derive’ which is based on the work of the Situationists, and the ‘Oracle of Sophia’, which explores nomadic displacement leading to an extinction event.

If you want to know more about the background to this work, the influences upon it and more detail on the Atmospheres please click on the link here to go to the paper on Hiraeth.