The spacious floor of the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery, at Vermont State University’s Johnson campus, currently holds a single, unexpected object: a raised garden bed. Strange things grow in its dirt: video screens, speakers, tiny plastic fans, 3D printouts of brains. Giant projections of shifting, heavily pixelated cloudscapes play across three walls. The sound of wind rises and falls unpredictably.
The installation, “10,000 Seeds and the Phantom Air,” is the work of Sean Clute, a multidisciplinary artist and composer who lives in Jericho. Clute, 50, teaches in Johnson’s fine and performing arts programs and directs the campus’ Media Arts Research Studio. The installation, which may strike visitors as an immersive sci-fi rendering of the natural world, is a very personal project for the artist.
Clute met Seven Days at the gallery for a few moments before heading out to teach an introductory class on media arts. He sees the elements of his title as ostensibly opposed, he explained. Seeds are “a physical, tangible thing,” he said, adding that the number represents for him a “milestone of achievement, like 10,000 steps or hours of practice.” Air, meanwhile, is “intangible, unpredictable, maybe ghostlike in its presence.”
As a high school student in Peru, N.Y., Clute’s life was largely focused on the physical world: He became an intensely competitive high jumper. He went on to join a Division 1 team at the University of New Mexico. “At the time, it was my life,” he said.
Recently, at his mother’s house, he discovered old VHS tapes of his high school meets, which became the catalyst for “10,000 Seeds” after he’d mulled over the idea, he said. The tapes capture him launching with arched back over a horizontal pole. Those grainy images replay on three small video screens in the garden bed, their looping suggestive of the countless hours of practice he put in.
Clute’s life has since taken unexpected turns — among them, neurological problems, he said. He likens these “uncertain elements” to the phantom air of his title. Such twists force him (and, the work implies, all of us) to “be intuitive and creative in our problem-solving and how we adapt.” Hours of practice no longer eliminate uncertainty, as his artist’s statement points out, but the capacity for discipline can help us adjust to challenges.
Among the garden bed’s nests of wires are 3D-printed models of brains in graduated sizes, which Clute made using scans of his own brain. Like all the objects in the bed, they are green, white and black. Planted among them is an ad-hoc structure of spindly plastic bars and hoses — suggesting synapses — from which hang paper tabs. Each tab is colored with a black dot that represents a seed, as if the (intangible) mental and the (tangible) physical have joined forces.
But it is the sound of air, delivered by eight speakers in the bed, that best communicates the theme of adaptability amid uncertainty. Each speaker emits a different recording Clute created: the ambient sounds of his backyard, including birds, clouds and planes; his wind chimes in different combinations; the air itself. The collective sound is run through a central computer — Clute creates his own software and hardware for his installations — and synchronized with the randomly generated cloudscapes. When the clouds begin to congregate more heavily, the sounds intensify and become, in his words, “slightly more processed in an unnatural way — more synthesized-sounding, more reverberant, something not like the natural recordings.” The effect for a visitor is to feel immersed in an eerily otherworldly atmosphere.
Clute earned his master’s in electronic music and recording media at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., where he studied with Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer in the field. He often performs his work at local venues such as the Community of Sound and Generator Makerspace in Burlington. He has done residencies in music in Germany, won awards at French and Italian film festivals, and taught electronic music and media courses at New York University’s Shanghai campus. In a review of Clute’s 2026 album Passing Landscapes and Lingering Imprints, Seven Days music editor Chris Farnsworth noted that he finds “novel ways to create his sonic experiments,” including burying microphones in his garden.
“He uses technology, but it comes out as very humane work,” said John Killacky, an artist and former executive director of the Flynn. Killacky commissioned Clute to create the sound compositions for two of his works: “FLUX” (2022), a video work inspired by the 1960s Fluxus movement; and “CORPUS,” a video and installation created for the 2025 BCA Center show “Do We Say Goodbye? Grief, Loss and Mourning.”
For “FLUX,” Killacky recalled, “I told him I wanted a nonemotional sound score. He took a stick and dragged it in front of his house and manipulated the recording. It was perfect.” At the BCA show, he added, where Clute’s composition was broadcast ambiently in the room, it “fit with everyone’s work” and made the room into a “sound chapel.”
Phillip Robertson, gallery director at Julian Scott, observed that after the busy opening of Clute’s show, visitors have been coming in and sitting with the work, as if finding it a meditative space. That’s what Killacky did recently. His takeaway? “I’m just wonderfully perplexed and grateful that someone’s making something that’s unique.” ➆
Sean Clute, “10,000 Seeds and the Phantom Air,” on view through October 2 at Julian Scott Memorial Gallery, Vermont State University-Johnson.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cultivating Discipline | Multimedia artist and composer Sean Clute explores the meanings of “practice” at Vermont State University-Johnson”
This article appears in Performing Arts Preview • 2026.
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