Benjamin Smith: Transmission, Play and Reciprocal Systems

Expansive Practice

Ben Smith is an artist whose broad, interdisciplinary work spans sound, film and moving image, social engagement and analogue technologies, often operating at the intersection of storytelling, memory and place. His approach is rooted in collaboration and exchange, creating frameworks where communities actively shape and transmit their own narratives. Working with a distinct openness to form, he builds projects that shift between platforms and contexts, foregrounding process as much as outcome and treating cultural production as a shared, evolving act.

Emerging through grassroots, self-initiated activity and shaped by a DIY ethos, Smith’s work reflects a long-standing commitment to making outside of formal structures while still engaging deeply with institutions, communities and public space. This independence underpins both the adaptability of his work and its responsiveness to the people and environments it is embedded within.

Ben Smith in his studio at Loiter, framed by sound equipment, instruments and analogue technologies that underpin his interdisciplinary work across audio, moving image and community-led storytelling.

Loiter, Sltwtr and the Splice Cream Truck

Smith’s work sits fluidly across Loiter’s ecosystem, where he maintains both installation and studio space, operating not as a fixed role but as an evolving mode of cultural transmission.

Known locally through the Splice Cream Truck, where ice cream becomes an invitation into the process of conversation, recording open expression and circulating community voice, his work extends far beyond a single format into a wider, deeply experimental ecology of storytelling, memory, co-presence of past and present, and exchange.

Alongside this, he actively supports Sltwtr Gallery, a Black-owned contemporary art space based at Loiter in East Cleveland, which launched with a 'Black History Month' exhibition featuring regional and international artists . Within this context, Sltwtr functions as a key site for presentation and exchange, complementing Smith’s more mobile and participatory work by providing a space where ideas, materials and collaborations can be held, exhibited and reactivated.

Together, these elements operate as interconnected platforms: the truck generates encounters in motion, Sltwtr provides a site for exhibition and amplification, and Loiter holds the wider ecosystem in which these forms circulate. Across all three, there is a consistent emphasis on accessibility, elevated cultural participation via informality, and participation, creating conditions where cultural production emerges through everyday interaction rather than being imposed as a fixed output.

A phone booth iteration of the Splice Cream Truck, transforming a familiar public interface into a site for recording, exchange and collective expression, where handwritten traces and voices accumulate as a living archive of community presence.

Analogue Media and Material Thinking

At the core of Smith’s work is an expanded understanding of media: analogue, tactile and social. His extensive collection of analogue technologies forms both a toolkit and a philosophy. These are not nostalgic artefacts but instruments for reactivating time, allowing stories to move between past and present, between speaker and listener, between archive, street and the possibilities between us.

This sensibility shapes his contributions to Sltwtr Gallery and carries into his curriculum, 'School for the Riffted': forms of activity that operate with a cross-city openness, loosely structured, responsive and intentionally playful. The work has a fixed site at Loiter but functions as a wider testing ground for interaction, where exhibition, conversation, sound and social encounter blur into one another.

One of many stores of analogue finds in the basement of Brownhoist, where radios, projectors and obsolete devices are gathered as both archive and active toolkit, materials through which the past and slow attention is reactivated in Smith’s ongoing exploration of sound, memory and transmission.

Play as Method

This playfulness is not incidental; it is methodological. Smith works across modes such as sound, food, conversation and installation with a lightness that allows participation without intimidation. Whether through mobile ice cream storytelling, informal recording sessions or gallery activations, there is a consistent commitment to lowering thresholds and inviting entry.

This extends into 'School for the Riffted', an emergent framework for collective learning that privileges lived experience, fragmentation and non-linear knowledge. Here, pedagogy is not delivered but co-constructed, riffed, interrupted and reshaped through those present in a collective school of immersive experience.

School for the Riffted, signalled through riff mechanics, a space where sound, experimentation and collective learning intersect, treating improvisation as method and transmission as a shared, evolving process.

Memory as Active Material

Currently, Smith is developing a community choir and a podcast project with East Cleveland seniors, working to convert isolation into society, and memory into present-day possibility. In line with his wider approach, voice does not sit as static oral histories but is treated as active material: as the memories of this group rise they are treated, reverentially, as something to be remixed, replayed and reinserted into contemporary life.

Memory, in this context, becomes generative rather than retrospective. Aligning with Loiter’s broader commitment to cultural preservation as a living, circulating practice, Smith describes listening to EC seniors' wistful memories of missed opportunities and sparking a conversion of lost to found: “Someone might tell me they wish they’d attended those dances in the ’50s and I say, so, let’s reimagine them, let’s dance now.”

Ben Smith within an installation space at Loiter, assembling analogue equipment, objects and atmospheres in an active environment where recording, display and social encounter converge.

Value, Exchange and Reciprocity

Underpinning all of this is a distinct orientation towards the ethics of value and exchange. Smith’s work begins from what might be understood as a personal gift, an abundant ability to offer attention, curiosity and technical skill that does not seek immediate extraction or return. Instead, it builds reciprocal systems.

Participants contribute stories, objects and presence, which are then transformed and returned in new forms such as film-fictions, discovery conversations and the adventure of shared experiences. Value circulates rather than accumulates, creating an ongoing cycle of contribution and reactivation.

An installation text within Ben Smith’s Loiter studio, framing his work as a “retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic sci-fi soul” practice, where analogue equipment, found artifacts and cinematic storytelling merge across music, film and physical space.

Transmission, Time and Place

This approach is tied to a deeper artistic discipline: the cultivation of self-possession. Smith’s work demonstrates an ability to absorb, to listen closely and then to shift frequency, translating what is heard into forms that can travel. The artist as a care-full conduit. There is a sensitivity to timing, to when something should be held and when it should be transmitted.

In this sense, his work operates as a form of time travel, drawing on the historic and cultural weight of East Cleveland while re-broadcasting it into the present moment with collectively altered resonance.

Situated within a place marked by layered histories of extraction and resilience, his work engages directly with the density of lived experience embedded in the environment. Rather than simplifying this complexity, he tunes into it, amplifies it and redistributes it through forms that remain open, participatory and in motion.