Chris Nichols

Working across light, sound, performance & digital systems

Naarm / Melbourne

Public art, responsive installations, light, sound, performance, generative media, sculpture, immersive environments, plant biofeedback and digital systems.

memory_feed

01 / Featured

memory_feed

2025

A digital exoskeleton of flexible curved LED screens wrapped around a peppercorn tree, shifting between camouflage, signal and ecological memory.

Responsive light and sound installation.
Merritts Place Reserve, Melbourne.
City of Melbourne Test Sites.

Buko Studio

As viewers approach, the surface transforms, revealing a living stream of colours and patterns drawn from the endemic plants that once populated this site.

memory_feed is a responsive light and sound installation by Chris Nichols, accompanied for the City of Melbourne edition by an original score by Dirk Peterson. Attached to a peppercorn tree in Merritts Place Reserve, Melbourne, the work uses flexible curved LED screens to form a digital exoskeleton around the tree, shifting between camouflage, signal and ecological memory.

The work explores whether digital technologies, usually associated with commercial signage, attention economies and the glow of urban light pollution, can be re-directed to loop the past back into view or imagine new ecological futures.

The screens act as woven extensions of the tree and as speculative portals, re-animating visual textures of species no longer present and acknowledging the layered histories held in the soil.

The first edition was accompanied by Peterson’s sound score, blending microbat echolocation recordings with synthesisers to create a subtle, atmospheric soundscape. The score attunes to what lies beyond human perception, inviting viewers to reflect on the histories of this place long before skyscrapers and city lights.

Studio: Buko Studio
Score: Dirk Peterson (City of Melbourne edition)
Programming: Auravis Creative
Video soundtrack: Myllo
Presented: City of Melbourne Test Sites, 2025

memoryfeed.live ↗

Canopy, night

Pink LED ribbon twisting through the branches of the peppercorn tree at night — Exoskeleton

Two visitors look up at glowing LED forms in the tree canopy at night — Visitors, Merritts Place

memory_feed — film, 1:18, soundtrack by Myllo

BioRhythm

02 / Featured

BioRhythm

2023–2024

A multi-sensory public artwork that transformed the junction of Greville Street and Grattan Gardens into an evolving landscape of plant biofeedback, colour, sound and light.

Plant biofeedback, light, sound and public space.
Greville Street & Grattan Gardens, Prahran.

Buko Studio

Using signals from endemic plants, the work translated living biological rhythms into a constantly changing sensory environment.

BioRhythm invited the public to encounter nature as an active presence within the urban environment, fostering curiosity, connection and discovery.

By blurring the lines between biology, technology and place, the installation created a living, adaptable sculpture that responded to its surroundings and reimagined the public square as a site of ecological attention.

As people moved through the installation, visitors were invited to explore nature’s intrinsic role in urban environments and deepen their perspective on place through QR code-enhanced educational materials.

By: Buko Studio & Public Street, led by Chris Nichols, Amir Mahdavian & Rachel Iampolski
Design: Buko Studio with Guilherme Giantini
Score: Generative music by Timothy McDonald and Berkay Mete

biorhythm.live ↗

Cyclists pass the glowing BioRhythm pavilion in Grattan Gardens at dusk — Grattan Gardens, dusk

BioRhythm lit pink and red at night beneath festoon lights — Night

BioRhythm seen across the curved green-tiled seating of Grattan Gardens — From the seating

Light columns of BioRhythm glowing magenta and violet in the dark — Light columns

BioRhythm at night on Greville Street with reflections on wet paving — Greville Street

1 / 3

BioRhythm at Grattan Gardens — film by Buko Studio, 1:16

[Buko Studio]

memory_feed, BioRhythm and Daloy were made through Buko Studio, the experimental design studio I founded in Naarm/Melbourne.

Buko Studio creates public artworks, responsive installations and immersive environments across light, sound and sculpture, bringing together programmers, composers, designers and fabricators around each work.

bukostudio.co ↗ @buko_studio ↗

More works

Daloy

Winner — Ashley Crawford Prize, NotFair 2026

2025 · Responsive LED installation · MARS Gallery, Melbourne Buko Studio

Stream of Consciousness – Daloy is a responsive installation of flexible LED forms that move through the gallery like digital vines. Inspired by organic systems but rendered through a hyper-contemporary medium, the work behaves like an ecosystem, shifting in light and sound as visitors enter its field.

Coded textures, organic scans and generative animations flow across the screens, evoking the invisible systems that move through air, language, memory, symbolism, the earth and the self.

The installation features a soundtrack developed by musician Berkay Mete, with different instruments triggered as the work elevates the viewer through shifting levels of intensity.

Daloy reflects an introspective meditation on invisible systems, sensory entanglement and the constant flow of information that surrounds us.

Materials: Flexible curved LED screens, generative animation and sound
Sound: Berkay Mete (MARS Gallery edition); Dirk Peterson, Binaural Audio Telecommunication System (NotFair 2026)
Programming: Auravis Creative

MARS Gallery ↗

Undulating LED ribbon glowing red, blue and orange in a darkened gallery

Tall vertical LED screen rising from the floor in darkness

A visitor watches a patterned LED form curve down a red gallery wall

Blue and teal LED wave floating in the dark

Blue-patterned LED forms installed across a gallery floor

LED vines displaying organic scans along a red gallery wall

1 / 6

Daloy — film, 1:08, sound by Berkay Mete

Phantasia

2025 · Party, performance environment & social project · Quadrophonic Club, Brunswick · Produced by Magick Sarap

Phantasia is a party and performance environment by Magick Sarap, transforming the iconic Quadrophonic Club in Brunswick into a deep red, pulsating haze of pink and orange.

Emerging from the world of Club Trish, the event treats nightlife as a ritual space, where light, rhythm and collective energy shape a temporary world.

Selectors move through percussive house, disco and deep diasporic grooves, spanning Afro-house, Brazilian energia, SWANA rhythms, c*nty beats and archival dance treasures.

Phantasia poster: a figure in mirrored sunglasses under rainbow light, listing Sisterdeep, Magick Sarap, Ayso, Darcy OD and BisCHI Volandi, Friday 14 November 2025, Quadrophonic Club — Phantasia, Quadrophonic Club, 14 November 2025

Club Trish

Ongoing · Parties, sculptures & performances · Naarm/Melbourne

Club Trish was developed in Melbourne out of a love of ‘Trishness’, a flexible term encompassing that which is queer, avant-garde and sexy. Club Trish takes its form in the digital and physical worlds through parties, sculptures and performances and is better understood as an event in time where the unexpected unfolds.

trish.club ↗

Club Trish — 0:50