converging paths

arman ray is a British fine artist whose work spans digital image-making, visual art, film and electronic music. Across several decades, he has remained closely engaged with emerging technologies, not as ends in themselves, but as tools for extending the speed, range and possibilities of creative work.

digital research

Ray’s involvement with digital imaging began in the mid-1980s through his work in Art & Design education. Awarded a sabbatical as a Teacher Fellow, he undertook research for the UK Department for Education into the emerging field of electronic imaging: where the technology was likely to develop, how it might affect creative work, and what its implications could be for the teaching of Art & Design. The resulting paper examined a field that was still in its infancy and considered how computer-based image-making might become part of mainstream creative education.

the digital studio

On returning to teaching, Ray began putting those ideas into practice within the art studio. Digital technology gradually moved from being a specialist experiment to becoming central to the way he taught Art & Design. Students captured and digitised images, built visual image libraries, combined and collaged material, altered colour and form, distorted and transformed existing imagery, and used the computer as an everyday tool for developing ideas.

The work attracted significant attention. Educators visited to see how these methods were being integrated into everyday Art & Design teaching; some wrote about the work, while others began developing similar approaches within their own institutions. At one point, a small delegation of Italian educators visiting through the European Union came specifically to see what was being developed.

Atari recognised Ray as an influential early advocate for what were then often called electronic design systems and supported his work. The company benefited from the visibility surrounding these new approaches, while Ray was able to continue developing computer graphics as a serious creative and educational tool.

a way of working

The approach was still sufficiently new to meet resistance from more traditional views of Art & Design education, particularly those that placed conventional drawing ability at the centre of achievement. Ray increasingly saw digital imaging as a way of widening access to visual creativity. Students who lacked traditional technical drawing skills could nevertheless develop sophisticated visual ideas through image capture, manipulation and construction.

This became fundamental to his educational philosophy. Rather than accepting a system in which success depended heavily on a narrow range of traditional skills, Ray sought to create studio methods through which a much broader range of students could participate confidently and achieve highly. Digital imaging became one of the foundations of the exceptional results his students later achieved.

Ray subsequently became Education Officer at the Design Council, contributing to national thinking around design, technology and creative education.

exhibiting work

Alongside this work, he continued to develop his own artwork. From the 1990s onward, he contributed to group exhibitions and presented occasional solo projects, including Transcendent Perceptions at Seven Dials Gallery in London and Self and Other at The Asylum Gallery in Wolverhampton.

His exhibition activity was necessarily selective. A demanding full-time career in Art & Design education left limited time for developing a conventional gallery career, and although exhibition opportunities arose, he was rarely in a position to pursue them as extensively as he might otherwise have done. His own work continued alongside teaching, educational leadership and faculty development rather than as a separate full-time career.

When Ray began working seriously with digital imaging, he largely left painting behind. The attraction was not technological novelty for its own sake but speed and flexibility. Digital tools allowed ideas to be captured, tested, altered, combined and developed far more quickly than traditional painting, and this suited an artist increasingly interested in the generation and evolution of ideas rather than prolonged attachment to a particular medium, technique or style.

That approach has remained central to his work. Ray has never regarded himself as a specialist in a single medium. He moves readily between image, sound, film, design and digital systems, adopting new tools when they offer greater freedom, precision or speed. Technological change is therefore something to be explored rather than resisted, particularly when it opens new ways of developing ideas.

developing faculties of art + design

Ray went on to become the principal driving force behind the conception and development of two highly successful Art & Design faculties. His role went considerably beyond departmental administration: he helped conceive and build the creative environments themselves, shaping their philosophy, structure and methods of working.

As a Head of Art & Design, he achieved exceptional academic results. During the final decade before his retirement, around 75% of students entered for examination achieved A or A* grades, with a 100% pass rate in eight of those ten years — results substantially above national averages.

The work also involved the simultaneous direction of around sixty individual creative projects at any one time, often extremely diverse in concept, medium and ambition. These might range across painting, sculpture, photography, video, digital media and design, with each requiring its own practical, critical and conceptual response.

In effect, Ray was managing a constantly changing studio of parallel projects: recognising potential, making rapid judgements, solving very different creative problems and helping each project develop according to its own intentions. That experience fostered a confidence in moving quickly between different media and ideas while retaining an overview of the larger whole.

zen buddhism

Alongside his work in art and education, Ray maintained a long involvement with Buddhism extending across roughly five decades, including around forty years of engagement with Soto Zen. He attended retreats, took the precepts and, for a period, was an active member of a Zen community, occasionally leading practice sessions while never regarding himself as a teacher.

Over time, he deliberately stepped back from formal Zen involvement. He came to recognise that his own vocation lay not in monastic life but in art, and that his relationship with the world was fundamentally creative, sensory and engaged rather than renunciatory. Zen remained a deep influence, but art became the form through which he was most naturally able to respond to experience.

making electronic music

Following a retrospective at The Asylum Gallery in 2017, Ray increasingly extended his work into electronic music, releasing several EPs through WEATNU Records. His long familiarity with Buddhist and Zen thought inevitably began to enter that work, and he experimented with making music around ideas of awakening, perception and enlightenment.

There was, however, an obvious limitation. Ray understood Zen language, concepts and teaching through decades of reading and involvement, but he was not a Zen teacher and made no claim to be one. Attempts to create work around awakening could therefore only approach the subject from his own perspective.

converging paths

It was during this period that he encountered Zen Master Hyon Gak Sunim. The meeting brought together two very different but complementary backgrounds. Sunim carried the teaching itself; Ray brought decades of experience in visual culture, digital technology, music and creative direction, together with enough familiarity with Zen to recognise and work intelligently with what he was hearing.

That background proved essential. Ray was able to listen across large amounts of Sunim’s spoken teaching, recognise the central idea within a particular talk, and shape that material into forms that could function within music without reducing the teaching to isolated or decorative quotations.

The encounter also brought together two impulses that had been developing independently for many years. Ray had been searching for a way to make contemporary work around Zen without pretending to possess a teaching authority he did not have; Sunim had long held an impulse to bring Zen teaching into contemporary cultural forms. The Formless Track emerged from that convergence.

The result is a continuing six-year collaboration bringing living Zen teaching into electronic music, spoken word, film and image.

Sunim is the teacher and the teaching is his. Ray’s role is to recognise, select and shape the material, and to create the musical, visual and structural framework through which it can be encountered in contemporary forms.

the formless track

Within The Formless Track, many strands of Ray’s earlier experience come together. The project encompasses music production, sound, moving image, digital art, exhibition design and live presentation. Rather than treating these as separate disciplines, Ray works across them as parts of a single evolving body of work, shaping the relationships between different elements and deciding how each can contribute to the whole.

The ability to direct multiple creative processes at once — developed through years of managing diverse Art & Design projects — has proved particularly relevant to a collaboration in which music, film, image, technology and presentation continually overlap.

generative working

More recently, developments in generative imaging and generative music have opened another stage in Ray’s long engagement with digital processes. Rather than regarding generative systems as a break with his earlier work, he has incorporated them selectively into an existing approach based on exploration, selection, refinement, transformation and composition.

This includes Not Two, a later album within The Formless Track, which uses generative AI as one element of its production alongside original arrangement, editing, sound design, spoken teaching and extensive post-production. The technology is treated as a creative tool within a larger authored process, rather than as a substitute for artistic direction.

Ray’s virtual exhibitions extend the same approach across groups of images conceived less as isolated objects than as connected visual sequences, each exploring a particular idea, atmosphere or mode of perception.

For Ray, speed has increasingly become an important creative value. He is less interested in spending months or years refining a single object than in creating the conditions in which ideas can emerge, be tested, discarded, combined and developed. Digital tools make that kind of movement possible, allowing the creative process itself to remain active and exploratory.

towards now

Across image, sound, film and digital media, Ray’s career has developed as a continuous trajectory rather than a sequence of separate disciplines. New technologies have repeatedly opened new possibilities, but the underlying approach has remained consistent: explore the tools, test what they make possible, and use them to extend the range of the work.

The Formless Track is the latest manifestation of that process — bringing together many of the ideas, skills and ways of working that have developed across Ray’s life into a single, multi-layered body of work.