The Same Language at Different Scales: Ben Sheppee and Observatory Creative

Why the work Ben Sheppee makes for Jamiroquai’s O2 Arena and the work he makes for galleries are the same work

In late 2024, Ben Sheppee received a brief from Jay Kay of Jamiroquai. It arrived as four words: Egyptian. Cosmic. Paradise. Disco. The brief was for the visual identity of Heels of Steel, the band’s first major European arena tour in six years, fourteen dates from Barcelona to London’s O2, an evolving set list, a no-timecode approach to content, and a multi-plane LED rig built around the band’s signature transparent pyramids.

Four words is an unusual brief for a project of this scale. It is also, if you know Sheppee’s practice, a completely natural starting point. His fine art work begins from exactly this kind of compressed premise: a script system, a cultural fragment, a question about what a particular set of marks means and what happens when you take it apart. The movement from four words to a visual language capable of filling an arena is not a different kind of thinking from the movement from an alphabet to a generative animation series. It is the same thinking at a different scale.

The LSi (Light & Sound International) feature documenting the Heels of Steel production noted that Sheppee’s personal connection to the project gave it a particular resonance; he had performed in acid-jazz bands in the mid-1990s, directly shaped by Jamiroquai’s music. The detail is worth pausing on. It suggests that the commercial work and the biographical work are not as separate as they might appear from the outside.

Observatory Creative, which Sheppee founded in London, operates as a studio producing immersive experiences, LED stage content, and real-time generative animations for cultural and commercial clients. The studio has worked across music, corporate, fashion, and sport. Its technical infrastructure, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, After Effects, TouchDesigner is the same infrastructure Sheppee uses in the generative work that constitutes his fine art practice.

This is not a coincidence. Sheppee has been explicit about the relationship between the two sides of his work: the fine art practice is the research and development engine for the commercial work, and the scale and complexity of the commercial work push the fine art practice in directions it would not otherwise go. The Lucid series, typographic fluid animations that hover between legible letterform and pure abstraction, is fine art work that has also been installed as a permanent commission at the London Stock Exchange Group, as part of AV technology company Kinly’s Art of Productivity campaign, which won Gold at the PRmoment Awards 2026. The same visual language, the same formal investigation, operating simultaneously in a gallery register and a corporate one.

The Heels of Steel visual production is worth examining in some detail because it illustrates the translation process clearly. The brief’s four words: Egyptian, Cosmic, Paradise, Disco, each implied a visual world. Sheppee and his team at Observatory developed distinct content suites for each of the twenty-five songs on the set list, working to match the emotional and musical character of each track rather than simply decorating the stage.

The no-timecode approach was technically demanding and creatively interesting. Live music is not fixed; sets evolve, songs are reworked, and running orders change night to night. Visual content that is locked to a timecode becomes a cage. Content built for live, responsive deployment is a different kind of material: it has to be modular, adaptable, capable of working in multiple combinations and durations. This is precisely how Sheppee thinks about typographic animation in his fine art practice, as material that is inherently variable, whose meaning emerges from the specific conditions of each encounter.

The transparent pyramid LED structures that are central to the Jamiroquai stage design presented a particular challenge and opportunity. Transparent screens create a depth effect that is unusual in live production, the content appears to float inside the structure rather than on its surface. Sheppee’s experience with generative work that plays with spatial depth and visual layering was directly relevant. The Space Egypt content suite, designed for Cosmic Girl, was cited by Observatory’s technical director Simon Harris as one of the production’s standout moments.

The Heels of Steel production is the most extensively documented of Observatory’s live projects, but it is part of a longer practice. LSi previously documented Sheppee’s work creating tour visuals for Rudimental, naming him directly as the content creator for the production’s playback video. The Rudimental work and the Jamiroquai work represent different ends of a spectrum: the former built for an energetic, rhythm-driven electronic act, the latter for a band whose identity is inseparable from a specific visual heritage. In both cases, Sheppee’s approach was to understand the artist’s visual language rather than impose one.

There is a tendency, in writing about artists who also do commercial work, to frame the two as competing commitments, the authentic practice versus the compromised one, the gallery versus the market. This framing is rarely useful, and in Sheppee’s case, it is actively misleading.

The inquiry that runs through the fine art practice, what are the aesthetics of written language, what happens when scripts are pushed to their limits, what does a visual system communicate that words alone cannot, is the same inquiry that drives the commercial work. When Sheppee designs content for a Jamiroquai tour, he is asking what Egyptian iconography, cosmic imagery, and disco aesthetics share as visual systems. When he creates a typographic installation for the London Stock Exchange, he is asking what the Lucid series communicates about the instability of written language in a context that depends on the certainty of the written word. These are not separate questions with separate answers. They are the same question asked of different materials.

The four words of the Jamiroquai brief, Egyptian, Cosmic, Paradise, Disco, turn out to be a surprisingly good summary of Sheppee’s wider practice. Ancient and contemporary, transcendent and grounded, serious and joyful. A visual language that treats all of culture as equally available material and finds the connective tissue between traditions that are not supposed to belong together.

That is what the work does, at every scale.