Harris was educated at Cranbrook Kingswood School in Michigan before returning to England to read Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He graduated with top distinctions, qualifying as an architect in 2003, and went on to work for Future Systems, the avant-garde practice of Jan Kaplický.

In 2007 he founded his own studio in Notting Hill, London — now a team of more than twenty engineers, designers, coders, and fabricators who design, build, and test every artwork in-house, from the earliest software prototypes to the final calibrated installation.

It is a model closer to a Renaissance workshop or an aerospace lab than a conventional artist’s studio: a place where the frontiers of what is technically possible are tested daily.
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In the foreword to Harris’s solo exhibition Imagine (Halcyon Gallery, 2019), curator Sunny Cheung identifies “a thread of existentialism” running through the work: “a certain preoccupation with flowers, petals, butterflies, and a fascination with metamorphosis and transformative experiences.” These recurring subjects are not decorative. They are the vocabulary of a practice concerned with presence, fragility, and what it means to render the ephemeral permanent, and they are questions that have sharpened as the tools available to address them have grown more powerful

Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum and formerly Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts, has observed that Harris controls “every aspect of production, from the initial sketches to the realisation of imagery, to the coding, to the physical objects.” This total authorship ensures the conceptual and the material remain inseparable. Marlow’s summation of the work is characteristically precise: “Serious play, I think.”

Harris’s work has drawn sustained critical attention for its positioning at the convergence of Romanticism, cybernetics, and contemporary digital culture.

Harris’s interactive works are built on a precise technical premise: three-dimensional sensors map the viewer’s body in real time, and the artwork’s behaviour is generated in direct response to that data. The butterflies in Flutter (2011) scatter at a hand’s approach. The flowers in NeoBloom (2024) lean toward warmth. Nothing is pre-recorded; nothing loops. The work cannot exist without someone standing in front of it — a condition that makes interaction not a feature but an ontological requirement.

Recent projects have expanded this premise in scale and concept. The Promise of Babylon (2025) suspends a luminous globe of perpetually blooming flora in space — a garden whose seasons shift at the viewer’s touch, inverting the natural entropy of a still-life bouquet. Sounds of Liberty (2025) constructs an American flag from hand-painted digital butterflies that dissolve with each interaction, revealing live headlines beneath the symbolic surface. And at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Origins of Imagination (2024), created in collaboration with the Moveo Art Collection, invites visitors to draw a butterfly by hand, then watches as algorithmic processes transform that sketch into a photorealistic creature that joins a living digital ecosystem. Inspired by the children’s drawings found in the margins of Darwin’s manuscript of On the Origin of Species, the work shifts the viewer’s role from observer to co-creator.
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This trajectory, from rendered specimen to algorithmically generated creature, from passive display to participatory ecology, reflects a broader evolution in Harris’s practice. The subjects have always been drawn from the natural world: butterflies, birds, flowers, the structures of endangered habitats. What has changed is the sophistication of the tools. Where earlier works presented digital portraits of individual species, the most recent works use computational processes to engage with creatures whose survival in the physical world is no longer guaranteed, giving algorithmic permanence to animals that may otherwise exist only as data in a conservation archive. The anti-vanitas impulse that runs through all of Harris’s work finds its sharpest expression here: not flowers preserved from wilting, but entire species held in a kind of digital vigil..

The Disney collaboration offers a parallel lens. In the official Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs artwork — (Harris is the only artist granted access to the Disney archive), each character is faithfully rendered yet given algorithmic autonomy, subtly questioning obedience and agency within one of animation’s most iconic narratives. Across all of these works, technology operates as Harris’s material, never his co-author. The code serves the concept; the concept serves the viewer.