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updated: July 2025
swipe/scroll to view all projects below ︎
updated: July 2025
swipe/scroll to view all projects below ︎
About
Non-linear is a portal of inquiry established by graphic + sonic artist, multidisciplinary designer and educator Michael Hersrud. His exploratory creative practice involves analog, audiovisual, automation, data, drawing, dérive, geography, geometry, language, layering, looping, patterns, performance, printmaking, sound, space, surface and systems. The resulting projects, often collaborative, investigate experiences, interactions & phenomena. Michael is the co-director of the Sonic Jeel Research Lab.
Influences:
“In 1960s Paris, the Situationists initiated concepts like the dérive or psychogeography, but these days that sense of wandering through an indeterminate maze of intentionality can become the totality of the creative act. Selections, detection, defining morphologies, and building structures...”
The book ‘Rhythm Science’ by Paul D Miller (DJ Spooky)
“We have to inspire design to be more than utilitarian, to be more than functional. We need to inspire useless design, just for the sheer effort of inventing and creating things, as a way of innovating.”
The essay ‘A Reinvented Vocabulary: Decoding the Many Dimensions of African Design’ in an interview with Okwui Enwezor with Vitra Design Museum
“The basic elements for all creativity and innovation is copy, transform and combine... great ideas do not come from within, but are the result of outside forces...”
Kirby Ferguson on his series ‘Everything is a Remix’
Sometimes we see sounds and hear visuals.
Sonic Jeel Research Lab
Sonic Jeel celebrates the interplay of the sonic and the graphic. We collaborate with artists and designers to investigate sound, field recording, synthesizers, and audiovisual media within the context of Qatar and the Gulf region. Our lab is a platform for exploratory research, production and distribution of experimental sonic work relative to visual and tangible outcomes. The research lab was initiated cooperatively with my colleague Simone Muscolino.
Sonic Jeel Website ︎
Visual Soundscapes.
This work takes inspiration from early animation and sound pioneers such as Oskar Fischinger, John Whitney Sr., & Mary Ellen Bute. These are three looping audiovisual experiments as part of an ongoing project for Sonic Jeel. Exhibited in Doha at an installtion on contemporary sound.
All work created by Michael Hersrud unless otherwise noted.