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Inside here: Dispersal as a strategy in landscape-based critical-documentarist art practice
Full text linkIn the uncertain nature of our present time generated by conflicted relations with the material and virtual landscape, dispersal (as opposed to distribution) becomes a productive strategy. My landscape orientated, processual, critical-documentarist art practice presents images of sorts, and effects that move through space, and offers experiences of concrete realisations of movement, abstraction, and figures which are actualised within the field of encounters. My practice-based research develops close readings of moving image works, that documented trans-continental structures as paths through the landscape, and an interpretation of Joyce Wieland’s La raison avant la passion / Reason over Passion (1969 – 1983), Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970 – 1972), and Sophie Calle’s Double Blind / No Sex Last Night (1996). This research argues that structural film strategies are at odds with the concept of the frame as a device marking a bounded space. My videos: we all look at the same sky and water drawing (2019), and video installation: the sky is taught by falling (2023), move through the landscape while investigating the conceptual thinking around the transitional edge, a paradoxical understanding of the frame. In the works discussed in this research, the frame is conceptualised as a link between transition and movement. The nonlinearity of perceptions is brought into play to inform interpretations of different sites and practices, reaching out in directions beyond art practice. The reading of artworks considers abstraction and presentation, practices that are necessarily material, the space of a journey and Derrida’s punning neologism, différance to derive a theoretical position, a picturesque nonlinearity. These are strategies to which my practice refers, while pointing outwards to framing of space as space/time put forward by cultural geography, holding open the possibility of an open future. Smithson’s multiple artwork, Wieland’s earlier structural film, and Calle’s recursive diaristic procedure disassemble the political realm’s picturesque and sublime manifestations while documenting with, and near to, the essential daydream. This thesis argues, strategies of dispersal, within landscape-based critical-documentarist art practice, produce and expose an interpretation of the frames, the image frame and the frame as a conceptual device in these works. By working creatively and re-creatively with understandings of transition and movement art practitioners and others using moving image and videoing transform uncertainty and address conflicting ideas about spaces and the landscape. Practitioners are empowered to recognise new ways to address being in the world. Dispersal (as opposed to distribution) becomes a productive strategy as the nature of the process of production of space
From public policy to public value: How design practice supports the identification and creation of public value in the international policy-making context
Full text linkEarlier attempts to innovate in public policy have focused on making policy and its services more efficient (e.g. New Public Management). Today, reemphasized by 21st century’s ad hoc or permanently present, sophisticated issues that policy needs to solve for - be they the governance of new technologies, a global pandemic, growing inequality, and their impact on society, or climate change - we witness yet another fundamental paradigm shift: calls upon policy to optimize for achieving greater public value (e.g. Mazzucato 2018, Bason 2018). With the latter implying that ‘the public’, i.e. the policy recipients or “policy users”, be at the core of each policy decision to be made and to create for, the policy sector has turned to the design space to emphasize inclusion of user perspectives in its making. It has adopted approaches from design thinking, design research, service design to policy prototyping, to close the gap between itself and the policy recipients. Most of the research and practice in design for policy to date has focused, however, on design inserted as a tool or mechanism (e.g. to innovate) into existing policy-making approaches (e.g. policy cycle). The research presented in this thesis adopts a strategic stance and asks whether design can enhance policymaking in its core underlying function; that is the identification and creation of value for the public. This PhD adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of policy making, policy design and public value. Through three exploratory policy case studies at the international governance scene (semi-structured interviews, field notes and observations, survey) - the EU Policy Lab, the World Economic Forum C4IR, and a global, design-led governance initiative at a worldwide leading tech company (kept anonymous) - it highlights the role of design in filling knowledge gaps and addressing forward-looking challenges, applied to AI- and tech- related policymaking in particular. It looks at design as a matter of individual and collective value association and understands value and meaning based on individuals` (subject) value associations with regards to a particular policy topic or theme (object). The PhD argues that design practice in policy making brings actors back to the center stage. It highlights the importance of actor perspectives and value ascriptions in shaping policy content. It finds that design helps integrate alternate lived realities into the creation of policy content. By actively seeking out and acknowledging non-, under-, or misrepresented realities and value associations, it promotes inclusivity in international policy-making processes. It helps to bridge gaps in understanding and promotes dialogue and collaboration, closing thereby bounded rationalities. That leads to a more comprehensive and accurate representation of the various actors` viewpoints involved, and thus the policy topic at hand. By engaging in design practice, policy decision makers gain a more nuanced understanding of different stakeholders and their viewpoints. By leveraging design, policy can demonstrate and propose tangible examples, ideas, and narratives that highlight the value to be generated through policy, for whom it is intended, and how it can be implemented. Design activates, legitimizes, and bridges traditional (horizontal) and emerging (vertical) actors in the international governance arena, thereby enriching the policymaking process
ReWilding AI: The radical mattering of narrative ecologies via immersive and distributed intelligence
Full text linkReWilding AI represents the culmination of research projects exploring the radical mattering of narrative ecologies via immersive and distributed intelligence. Presented by Radical Matter proto-Centre, RCA School of Arts & Humanities and Digital Direction, School of Communication. Funded by AidLab, the first research platform that focuses on the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with design. AidLab was jointly established by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and the RCA, and is funded by the HKSAR Government under the InnoHK Research Clusters. Day 01 - Polymorph Friday 21 March 2025 , 10am-5pm On Day 1 of ReWilding AI, we invite you to experience a sensuous playful world of light, vibration, creatures and multi modal ‘time shelters’ inspired by the psychedelic skin transformations and emergent camouflaged topologies of cephalopods. We call its most recent iteration: Polymorph. Here you will walk amongst a complex adaptive generative system that integrates continuously retrained AI models via sensors, camera inputs, and diverse data streams. The experimental architecture in Polymorph II explores this emergent and distributed synthetic operation by translating incompossible sensorial domains—such as sound to image or electric signals to movement—generating unpredictable outcomes through this dynamic circulation. Polymorph evolves through continuous interaction with its environment, continuously retraining itself in response to air currents, body movements, and electromagnetic fluctuations, all of which are reflected in its outputs. Its emergent outcomes are both ‘undecidable’ and ‘unique’ - a wild encounter integrating processes and outcomes arising from the system's fluctuations and dynamics. Here unique operational patterns that depart from the conventional reliance on randomness for novelty in generative AI systems become the hallmark of its assets. Day 02 - Weather Spores Friday 28 March 2025, 10am-5pm On Day 2 of ReWilding AI, we invite you into the wondrous world of Weather Spores. Via our AI Toolkit and game board, here you will travel through a multi-dimensional maze of five immersive portals, shapeshifting across knowledge systems and new materials, encountering AI through the throw of a dice. Portal 1: Forest – where you will go on an augmented wander through dense 1000-year-old forests, experiencing the symbiotic interspecies intelligence of funghi, birds and the entangled visual, sonic and sensuous relationships that exist between the geosphere, atmosphere and electronic Noosphere; Portal 2: Ana-Cartographies – where you can navigate across expanded geographies of urban AI data systems, underground cables and complex arrays of energy-hungry cooling systems built along the route of the former British colonial all red-line. Or fall through to Portal 3: Extractivism (Capital pAIns) – where present-tense archaeologies of the supply chains that deliver AI – from mineral extraction, nanoscale manufacturing and e-waste, through algorithm design, data harvesting and cleaning by ghost-workers, to deployment and resistance in society can be witnessed and shared. Here we encounter a performative exploration of AI’s hidden planetary and human costs, bringing environmental sustainability into AI design futures. Portal 4: Unknowing/Asemic (or How meaning gets made) – here you will play with carbon and blow straws and ‘sticky encounters’ via the strange and wild worlds of ‘emergence’ and ‘indeterminacy’ to create art-driven algorithms to re-think the very nature of ‘generative’ AI as experimental, emergent materialities that literally ‘make’ or ‘create’ sense. Or step sideways to Portal 5’s Open Deck, where the very fundamentals of linear and non-linear thinking and creating triangulate with the political, the cultural and ethical to encourage different forms of individual and collective agency. Weather Spores will lead you into the stunning and paradoxical ecologies of AI, through new logics for AI storytelling grounded in indeterminacy, emergence and entanglement, querying the temporalities and geo-politics of AI, and rethinking immersive generative AI from the ground up and for the common good. Presented by RCA’s Radical Matter Research proto-Centre and Digital Direction Principal Research Leads: Johnny Golding and Tom Simmons Senior / Postdoctoral / Technical Research Associates: Samuele Albani, Sonia Bernac, Jonathan Boyd, Jeremy Keenan, Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, Maggie Roberts, Rian Stephens, Shira Wachsmann, John Wild and Tao Xi
Well-making, worlding, workshops and wardrobes: Caring through clothing and textiles
Full text linkThis book chapter draws on research from two projects: Making with My Mother: a qualitative research study, and S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing, where participants work with textiles in creative, collaborative ways. Looking through the lens of feminism, material culture and affect, reveals how these experiential making processes locate care rather than competition at the centre of social relations as participants attune to others and alternative agencies, values, and ways of being-in-the-world
Look around you! Situating extended reality within the urban fabric
Full text linkThe future of Extended Reality (XR) technologies is revolutionising our interactions with digital content, transforming how we perceive reality, and enhancing our problem-solving capabilities. However, many XR applications remain technology-driven, often disregarding the broader context of their use and failing to address fundamental human needs. In this paper, we present a teaching-led design project that asks postgraduate design students to explore the future of XR through low-fidelity, screen-free prototypes with a focus on observed human needs derived from six specific locations in central London, UK. By looking at the city and built environment as lenses for exploring everyday scenarios, the project encourages design provocations rooted in real-world challenges. Through this exploration, we aim to inspire new perspectives on the future states of XR, advocating for human-centred, inclusive, and accessible solutions. By bridging the gap between technological innovation and lived experience, this project outlines a pathway toward XR technologies that prioritise societal benefit and address real human needs
Objects, bodies, territories: The financial calculations of border regimes and humanitarian governance
Full text linkMarked by unprecedented numbers of forcibly displaced individuals from the Middle East, the African continent, and Asia, the intricacies of European humanitarian governance and border regimes have become critical components of contemporary geopolitics. This thesis contends that a financial logic underpins these mechanisms, investigating the legal and architectural processes involved in producing and assigning statuses—refugee, asylum applicant, detainee, or deportee—to displaced individuals. While these processes may appear purely administrative, they instead act as catalysts for intricate assemblages that extract financial and biopolitical value from displaced bodies. A value that transcends conventional financial transactions, and encompasses the allocation of resources, the exertion of control, and the shaping of public opinion. Through its chapters, the thesis seeks to uncover these financial machinations, where naming operates as a strategic tool for categorisation, segregation, and exploitation. It also examines how economic calculations infiltrate every phase of displacement: from the initial act of flight, through perilous journeys, arrival in foreign lands, incarceration, and internment in various facilities, to eventual settlement in urban or rural settings for some—or, more often, repatriation for others deemed ineligible. Central to this research is the development of a material and visual practice that exposes the violence inherent in the regime of calculations perpetuated by humanitarian governance and border apparatuses. Through iterative interviews with aid workers, live-action recordings of sites, and the use of physical (architectural) models, this practice seeks to document and testify to systemic violence. Physical models, in particular, are more than mere tools of representation; they serve as evidentiary media, capable of measuring, studying, and analysing these calculations while amplifying the voices of those ensnared in extractive systems. By employing physical models, this thesis underscores their ability to embody and articulate the spatial, material, and corporeal relationships that define the migrant experience. Thus, I argue that these models can function as operative objects that are able to reframe advocacy discussions, generating a field through which claims and counterclaims can be articulated, exposing the financial and biopolitical dimensions of displacement, and offering the potential to inspire new policies and practices aimed at dismantling the regime of calculations. Ultimately contributing to a more equitable response to the challenges faced by displaced populations worldwide
Microbriefs: Using design sprints in practice based education
Full text linkThis paper introduces an educational approach implemented within the Design Products MA programme of the Royal College of Art in London UK, focusing on enabling students to develop their personal practice around their values, concerns, and materialities. The approach integrates Kolb's experiential learning theory, design sprints, and the community of practice framework to foster hands-on problem-solving within set time frames, encourage collaboration, and facilitate reflective discussions. The 'Experimental Design' unit, building on the 'Locating Practice' unit, aims to broaden students' horizons through consecutive 'Microbriefs,' emphasizing trial and error to expand creative bandwidth and explore various design practices, materials, and technologies. The six Microbriefs undertaken during the curriculum explore themes such as self-portraiture, spatial design, communication, error, traditional meaning-making, and ethics in design
A wrong kind of landscape: Essaying the Broads
No full textThis visual essay is developed from an archive of site videos, photographs, photogrammetry and studio models, accumulated over walks along the 37.5-mile Wherryman’s Way on the Norfolk Broads. The archive was initiated, and has continued beyond, a Heritage Lottery Fund public project 'Mapping the Broads', in partnership with the Norfolk Broads Authority. The essay has been accepted by the Journal of Illustration for their second issue of 'Heritage', to be published later in 2026. The essay will critically reflect on what is and is not seen through a heritage lens on landscape – and (drawing on David Matless, paraphrasing W.J.T. Mitchell) “approach landscape as a verb rather than a noun.
Trans get down: Hospicing He-Man at the bitter end
No full textPatriarchy’s tantrum of death sees attacks on trans people, refugees, migrants, and “politics of inclusion” which is shorthand for the right to racism and misogyny. The end might come in the guise of climate breakdown, or social uprisings, but it is coming closer, and we are part of it. In this performance talk, combining text and visuals, Mijke van der Drift and Zissel Aronow offer transfeminist concepts and practices for helping patriarchy face its own bitter end
The unruliness of matter: A weaving of affective, sensory, conversational, and kinky algorithmic grids
Full text linkThe Unruliness of Matter looks at ways in which complexity, unpredictability, sensuality, and a vibrant materiality can be introduced into algorithmically driven sensing systems. The current proliferation of technological systems assumes that matter, the experience of being human and agency are calculable, indexical and goal oriented. In response, through three distinct material investigations, this thesis develops a novel framework for reconceptualizing human-machine assemblages. Each investigation constructs its own grid: an affective grid emerging through a series of video-essays that explore embodied narratives and radical presence, a sensory-conversational grid manifested in wearable environments woven with sensors and actuators that investigate gestural communication, and a kinky grid of photographic assemblages in conversation with algorithmic pattern recognition. Together they form a polymorphous framework where affect and encounter become primary–this framework is understood as a porous membrane and atmosphere where pattern moves from repetition to unruliness so that a distributed and disturbed topological surface can emerge. The practice introduces kinetic energy, depth, volume, intensity, vibration, and resonance to typically flattened algorithmic spaces. Through its varied manifestations, it develops an affective modality for representational practices and examines how the symbolic turns literal in encounters with materiality and technology, exposing the epistemological and ontological bearings embedded in algorithmic logics. The Unruliness of Matter charts a progression from an intimate relationship with the self and its immediate surroundings where an atmosphere is established, to a relationship of self with a proximate algorithmic other through embodied and gestural machine learning architectures in the form of two wearables, and finally to a direct and ongoing conversation with the algorithmic 'they'— plural yet singular, disembodied data aggregates consuming vast amounts of energy, both literally and psychically, turning atmosphere into a consolidated environment driven by economic infrastructures. In an urgent recapitulation of the paradigm shift that transverses biology, physics, and philosophy today, the making of the artifacts in the practice is undertaken as a series of encounters that introduce a polymorphous sensibility for describing technological affect. Each chapter weaves its own grid—affective, sensory-conversational, and kinky—coming together to propose a polymorphous framework that suggests new ways for imagining human-machine assemblages. This framework maintains the richness and complexity of human experience while engaging with technological systems in more nuanced, transformative ways. Through these material encounters and their deliberate kinking of established patterns, the work demonstrates how algorithmic systems might be recrafted from processes of reduction into expansive sites of co-creation and possibility