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An Early Universe
No full textThis artwork was made in collaboration with The Gravity Laboratory at the University of Nottingham and would not have been possible without the help of the scientists there. In particular Dr. Vitor Barroso Silveira, Dr. Lina Jansson, Maciej Jarema, Dr. Ulrike Kuchner, Dr. Patrik Švančara and Professor Silke Weinfurtner.
An Early Universe offers a glimpse into the first moments after the Big Bang, recreating the extreme dynamics when waves and oscillations shaped the cosmos. The rippling water at the heart of the installation serves as an analogue for the early universe, drawing on the shared mathematical principles that govern both the water’s surface and the early cosmos. This exploration invites deeper philosophical reflection: how can models truly bring us closer to understanding the universe’s most elusive mysteries?
The universe began with the Big Bang, igniting a rapid expansion called inflation. In that moment, it was intensely hot and dense. As it cooled, particles formed the first nuclei of hydrogen and helium. After 380,000 years, light travelled freely for the first time, creating the cosmic microwave background— a faint radiation of the universe’s infancy.
In the gallery, McClymont recreates these conditions through the resonance of water. A speaker, sweeping through a range of frequencies, shakes the water, creating waves that reflect white light. Magnified through lenses and projected onto a screen, they form intricate, shifting patterns. These forms, reminiscent of early cosmic oscillations, fill the space with a vibrant visual spectacle. Simultaneously, a low-frequency sub-bass speaker positioned in the corner of the gallery emits the same frequency vibrations through the space. They are felt in the body and heard as subtle reverberations, offering an embodied experience of the forces that shaped the universe.
In his accompanying wall-hung sculpture, McClymont freezes time. The glossy black form of a 3D scan of the water’s vibrating surface captures a fleeting moment of fluid motion, providing a tangible record of patterns too rapid to perceive.
The installation’s evolution was a year-long, collaborative journey between McClymont and scientists at the Gravity Laboratory at Nottingham. Artistic provocations sparked new scientific inquiries, while scientific discoveries enriched McClymont’s vision. Through sound, light, and form, An Early Universe blends emotional resonance with scientific rigour, inviting reflection on the dynamic forces that shaped the universe and that continue to shape our understanding of it.
Created in collaboration with the University of Nottingham’s Gravity Laboratory, Dr. Lina Jansson and ARTlab
New Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies, ed. by Ashley Bellet
Get PDFA review of the book New Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies, ed. by Ashley Bellet (London: Routledge, 2024)
In the Garden: Listening, Learning, and Animating the More-than-Human
No full textThis presentation explores the intersection of expanded animation, ecological consciousness, and interspecies communication through In the Garden: Giggles in the Greenery, a collaborative multimedia project within the graphic anthology Anima Mundi. Bringing together 12 artists across disciplines, the project engages with the sensory and symbolic dimensions of entheogenic plants through animation, sound, and visual storytelling, evoking more-than-human ways of knowing. Drawing on historical, mythological, and spiritual research, the project engages with animation as both an artistic and epistemological tool—one that enables us to listen, translate, and speculate on knowledge beyond the human (Schultes, Hofmann & Rätsch, 1998; Lehner & Lehner, 1960).
Inspired by Jane Bennett’s (2010) concept of vibrant matter, which emphasizes the agency of non-human entities, In the Garden considers how materials themselves participate in shaping knowledge. This idea resonates with animation’s capacity to render the unseen visible, offering a speculative means to explore the communicative and epistemological capacities of the more-than-human world. The project also reflects Ursula K. Le Guin’s (2017) assertion that speculative storytelling allows us to question dominant anthropocentric narratives while fostering a deeper attunement to the ecological systems we inhabit.
At its core, Anima Mundi is rooted in the recognition that intelligence and communication exist in forms entirely different from our own (Bridle, 2022; Kohn, 2013). By embracing both publication and animation, the project creates artefacts that invite audiences to engage with the ways plants, fungi, and minerals communicate across time, space, and symbiotic relationships. The first installment, In the Garden, specifically explores entheogenic plants and their historical role as guides and mediators of consciousness, offering an alternative framework for understanding interspecies interactions (Tsing, 2015).
This presentation will showcase both the publication and the animated film, examining how animation—through its ability to visualize the unseen—can function as a conduit for interspecies storytelling. How can artistic research, through embodied and sensory practices, expand our capacity to know beyond the limits of human language (Ingold, 2011)? How might collaborative processes with other artists, materials, and living beings open new ways of perceiving truth and interconnectedness?
Through speculative storytelling and artistic research, In the Garden investigates how deep listening, embodied knowledge, and animation’s unique capacity for metamorphosis can reshape our understanding of truth, interconnectivity, and ecological awareness. By attending to the voices of the more-than-human world, this project aligns with the symposium’s broader questions about how knowledge is shaped through media and how artistic practice can offer forms of resistance to dominant, anthropocentric frameworks
Generative Topolinguistics: Bidirectional Interfaces for Emergent Language Topologies
Get PDFThe experimental framework set out for generative topolinguistics seeks to investigate the sociality of meaning construction in artificial cognitive systems. While the semanticity of artificial linguistic systems is an emerging area of research, our work explores how the tokenization of language could produce new interfaces for the exploration of sociolinguistic phenomena. Generative topolinguistics presents a perspective on artificial sociality in simulated environments, employing a functionalist framework to capture its structure through token interactions inside the high-dimensional vector spaces of modern LLMs. In our model, language functions geometrically while sociality functions topologically, with changes in the topology of movement in semantic space interpreted as social behavior. Through the proposal of a bidirectional interface for large language models, we speculate how structural manipulations of semantic space could lead to the emergence of various sociolinguistic features that scaffold toward interpretable higher-order social phenomena
The Terrifying Mystery of the Cave: Interview With Georgina Voss
Get PDFThe exploration of systems that Georgina Voss proposes engages with their affective dimensions and the complex interplay between visibility, power, and the unknown, reimagined as The Terrifying Mystery of the Cave. This metaphor shifts focus from the expectation of solutions to an acknowledgment of the profound complexity and enigmatic nature of systemic challenges. Drawing on perspectives from cybernetics to design theory, this analysis interrogates the mechanistic metaphors dominating system thinking, situating them within broader socio-political and historical contexts. A central focus lies in the tension between what is visible and what remains hidden — what occurs “backstage” — and the ways these obscured layers shape the visible outcomes of systems. Deterministic framings of systems as controllable entities are critiqued, emphasizing their human-made origins and deeply ingrained ideological structures. The unknown emerges as a generative space, where unknowing becomes a means to rethink complexity and disrupt reductive narratives
From garment to knowledge: a triangulated methodological approach to practice-related research
Get PDFThis presentation explores a triangulation approach, employing three interconnected yet distinct methods: dress as object of evidence, remaking as research method, and embodied research as process of knowing. Triangulation in research refers to the use of multiple methods, data sources, or theoretical perspectives to explore a research question for improving the accuracy of a study. Aiming to break down the division between theory and practice, this approach addresses the potential of practice-based inquiry to inform and activate theoretical frameworks, while at the same time improving practical work with theoretical insights. ‘Dress as object of evidence’ involves the analysis of material culture, allowing for a rigorous examination of historical garments to revel techniques of constructions. This serves as a link between theory and practice by supporting hypothetical discussions of culture, labour, and identity in a tangible physical object. ‘Remaking as research method’, demonstrates how the process of reconstructing historical garments allows practitioners to engage with theoretical concepts such as materiality, gender, and social function, thus facilitating a better understanding of the relationship between historical theory and contemporary practice. ‘Embodied research as process of knowing’ engages with the remade garments in an experiential and sensory way, offering an embodied understanding of theory that cannot be captured through intellectual analysis alone. By triangulating these three methods, this framework demonstrates how the integration of practices can activate theory, expand knowledge, and contribute to a comprehensive understanding of both theoretical contexts and practical experiences
Collectarium Lockdown Space: Sharing Viral Domestic Transformations
No full textThe collaborative research project, Collectarium Lockdown Space, began during the Covid pandemic in 2021. At this time, we had to radically alter the way we lived to protect ourselves from this life-threatening virus. For so many at this time, public and private space was collapsed into that of the home, with quotidian domestic space under intense pressure to also become space for people to work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape.
The project was devised to collect and record this significant shift in the demands placed on domestic space. Collectarium (Allyson Waller and Sophie Beard) with Peter Maloney used Instagram to invite people to submit posts to show how they had adapted, transformed and expanded their domestic environment during this time to meet their individual and collective everyday needs. This paper and presentation will evidence specific examples of the innovative spatial transformations and behavioural adaptations that took place through the submitted Instagram posts. It will show how, for many, the home simultaneously functioned as the office, the gym, the school, the artists’ and designer’s studio, the pub, the club, the campsite, the restaurant, the beach and spaces of the imaginary as well as the more traditional space of privacy and
security.
We will discuss how subsequent analysis of the collection revealed new typologies of domestic ritual and spatial design during this time. Despite the fear, anxiety and despair that accompany the memory of this time for so many, the collection will reveal the positive, determined and joyful approaches taken to survive and thrive through urgent adaptations to our domestic space. We will speculate how these have begun to shape the demands of our future domestic space.
We will show how examples from the collection were reactivated and re-imagined as site-specific participatory installations for the Now Play This festival in 2024 which explored liminality and play at Somerset House, London and we will preview the forthcoming publication
Fashion, Export and World War Two
No full textThe British fashion industry was gravely affected by World War Two. The industry experienced labour and material shortages, and many businesses, largely based in London’s West End, saw their premises destroyed. Despite these challenges, British manufacturers continued to produce fashionable garments for home and export markets throughout the war. Exports were important for the fashion industry’s survival, but lucrative export markets like the United States became challenging to reach.
In order to try and maintain international customers fashion manufacturers staged several innovative trade drives during WWII. This paper focuses on one drive, the 1941 ‘Women’s Fashion Export Group of Great Britain’ (FEG) export drive to North America. The mission saw around 2,000 garments from over eighty British manufacturers exhibited in New York with store buyers travelling from across North America to view garments.
Studying the garments produced for the drive and associated advertising and editorials this paper explores the importance of this drive in promoting London as a ready-to-wear ‘fashion centre’ and establishing British fashion distinctiveness during the war. It also queries how straitened conditions helped engender collaboration across the British fashion industry.
This paper also considers the significance of Percy Trilnick, who led the export drive. Trilnick had worked in the United States and also imported American fashions to sell in Britain. However, when war struck Trilnick was forced to manufacture in London. With his experience of the American industry, he saw an opportunity to export high-quality British fashions to America and planned the 1941 export drive with other key industry figures.
The 1941 drive was very successful. However, whilst the FEG planned similar drives, owing to the increasing challenges of WWII, no more took place. This paper finally questions the legacy of the 1941 drive and how it inspired post-war export initiatives
Printing Cinema? Printed Matter, Exhibition, and Film in Rosa Barba’s Work
Get PDFRosa Barba’s practice, at the intersection of experimental film, sculpture, and installation, engages with the different components of the cinematic apparatus—16 mm projectors, the reel, light, sound—but treats them as the minimal units of a language that she re-composes, thereby creating a tension between materiality, image, and text. Her work is based, in part, on the transposition and translation of elements traditionally associated with the sphere of film within the space of a gallery or museum. Since 2004, in parallel to her installation and exhibition projects, Barba has been developing a series of artists’ publications entitled Printed Cinema. Each issue, published on the occasion of a particular exhibition, brings together views from her own installations with texts, photographs, and other material. The page and the space of the book have been investigated by artists as alternative or expanded exhibition spaces, creating different modes of presentation and dissemination of artworks. This essay will attempt to read Barba’s project in relation to the history of the artist book as a conceptual practice, following media theorist Matthew Fuller’s proposal of the “book as diagram” and as “differentiated and generative”. By so doing, it will explore the relationship between her installations and exhibitions, and Printed Cinema, not only as one of adaptation from one medium to another, but as co-articulation between two dynamic, processual, open forms
