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The Byre,'what remains'
No full textThis exhibition was a result of two research residencies that explored the geological and atmospheric landscapes of Caithness, Scotland, through the medium of glass. Over the course of a year, the artefacts exhibited were a documentation of the landscape’s textural imprints and atmospheric transitions. These observations—rugged rocks, oceanic mists, and the continuous reshaping of the land—inform the development of site-specific glass works that were installed at The Byre in Caithness, Scotland in August 2024. The objects and research integrates glass casting with ceramic techniques, exploring the flow, colour, and opacity of glass to mirror the forces of erosion, weather, and geological transformation. By observing the forces that shape the landscape, the works in this collection looked to create a sense of time in transition, capturing the fleeting yet persistent elements of nature. The process-driven approach uses wax turning, clay throwing, and silicon moulds to capture motion and texture within the glass, creating vessels that reflect both the landscape's historical depth and its dynamic present. This research contributes to material studies, demonstrating how glass can embody the physical processes and unseen forces that define natural landscapes. The final Exhibition ‘What Remain’s’ is the fourth exhibition at The Byre, a centuries-old stone barn turned exhibition space in Caithness. What Remains features site-specific installations and works by 4 artists that reflect on stories and experiences reconstructed from fleeting shadows in memory and the earthed-over remnants found in the landscape
Listening to Éliane
Get PDFAura Satz describes the process of working on a series of works connected to Éliane Radigue’s music and compositional relationships, including a transcript of an experimental audio documentary ‘Tone Transmission’, recorded during lockdown in the summer of 2020
Inclusive innovation in water services: R+B (Research + Business) case study
No full textThis collaboration is an evolving partnership between the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) at London's Royal College of Art and Northumbrian Water Group (NWG). Over the last two years they worked together to embed people-centredness and inclusivity within everyday business and service design. Beginning in 2022 the HHCD team ran a six-month program on creative leadership and inclusive innovation for 34 of NWG’s innovation leaders. Outcomes of the programme ranged from workplace solutions to customer communications and campaigns. Following on from the programme the HHCD joined Northumbrian Water’s 2022 and 2023 Innovation Festivals as an Inclusive Innovation partner. This involved the co-design and co-delivery of design sprints with diverse cohorts of water services stakeholders, to develop stronger customer-centric communications with a particular focus on supporting better vulnerable customers. Additionally, Two Award-winning innovation student graduates formed WATERAWARE COLLECTIVE and went on to create the Smart Tow Float Dry Bag through using low-cost hardware, high tech software and citizen science to make mass scale water quality testing cheaper. Ninela and Jennie will present the different models of knowledge exchange that have shaped their ongoing collaboration. They will focus on the value of design-led and people-centred approaches to transform everyday business thinking and practice, and the range of outputs and outcomes
Discrete accidents of photogrammetry: Re-presenting pure surface in Google Earth
No full textRe-presentation is a critical artistic method for revealing the depresented, i.e. deliberately hidden, strategic origins of a designed visual object. I developed this as a method for tactically resistant visual arts practice, inspired by Vilem Flusser’s methodology for ‘playing against the camera’, itself a set of suggestions for using image technology in resistance to its compromised origins. Shifting between two voices, one critical and contextualising, the other speculative, this work attempts to perform a re-presentation of the Google Earth (GE) virtual model of a public park in Greater London. The writing uses Shoshana Zuboff’s dispossession cycle as a framework for understanding the role of networked, surveillant, robotic images in the corporate acquisition and control of human behaviour. I present traces found within GE, a familiar robotic vision of everyday life, that point to the depresentation, or deliberate obfuscation, of their role as algorithmically composed aesthetic objects in the project of sustaining and extending the power of surveillance capitalists. Given the composite nature of the robotic vision that is GE, the inclusion or exclusion of particular forms of anecdotal visual information in the representation, e.g. picnickers, are at first puzzling, later suspicious. The closely observed comparison of virtual and physical navigations raises questions around surface, friction, and embodiment that point to the disembodied flows of personal information back to the surveillance capitalism giant Google
The world to me was a secret: Caesious, zinnober, celadon, and virescent
No full textA new site-specific commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani responds to the unique context of The Cosmic House and traces the connections between the artist’s thinking and that of Charles Jencks, touching on anthropomorphism, Ad-Hocism, surrealism and the Promethean impulse. Shani’s work at The Cosmic House draws on the various mythologies that were metabolised in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. A surrealist exquisite corpse made real, Frankenstein’s Monster sits within Jencks’ definition of Ad-Hocism which, for him, meant the use of materials and objects for unintended purposes, with surreal results. As a riposte to the abstract ‘language’ of Modern Architecture, The Cosmic House re-centred the human figure as its main subject; a theme that can be traced through its playful metaphors of architectural elements as body parts. In Jencks’ Cosmic House, doors with symmetrical handles are metaphors for the body, capitals, windows and facades become faces. A built manifesto of Post-Modernism, the house doubles up as a personal self-portrait of Jencks and his family. While exploring the mimesis between the house and the body, Shani’s poetic intervention connects Ad-Hocism to artistic creation. The exhibition’s title directly quotes Shelley’s novel, and the four different hues of green read like an incantation that references the viridescent cinematic depictions of the Monster. Her installation transforms the lower-ground floor gallery space of the house and the ensemble of the sculptural elements, prints and paintings illustrate the miracle of synthetic life. Shani’s newly commissioned multimedia installation is complemented by a poetic text by the artist (available in print in the gallery), that traces potential links between The Cosmic House and other historical and mythical houses that anthropomorphise architecture – such as the houses of Carlo Mollino, King Ludwig’s operatic castles, and Dali’s dream of Venus Pavillion. The visionary architecture of these buildings share a common character as they unfold around personal cosmologies of their own creators and turn into a series of architectural reproductions of the self. The World to Me Was a Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent is scored by experimental pop composer felicita, and accompanied by a thematic publication, published in collaboration with Strange Attractor and released in autumn 2024
The image as a template for posing
Get PDFI almost constantly feel the nagging need to pick up my phone. To check it, to search on it and doomscroll. My for-camera video and photographic self-portraits are a response to what I see. In my home, using my iPhone, I recreate other people’s selfie gestures, follow selfie-making tutorials, I ‘smize’, ‘finger-mouth’ and pronounce “prune” with a speech coach. Prior to this study, I wasn’t much of a selfie-maker, I didn’t have a grasp of the conventions, whilst I was aware of the ‘duck-face pout’, I did not know saying the word “prune” to my camera-phone would help me master it. In this sense, I am learning through doing by following a particular prosumer-image practice. Combining methods of self-portraiture, reenactment, image-appropriation, and humour, I re-perform the image, for the next image, drawing upon a specific body of imagery sourced from online marketplaces, which I make analogue, repeat bodily, and return to the digital as a new model for being – a process and concept I refer to as: ‘the image as a template for posing’. I also follow verbal templates for being, to augment, transgress and deconstruct posing templates, to make other ways of being imaginable. My embodied remixing of image-templates, selfie-images and selfie-gestures allows me to rethink the manipulation of images and the desire to perform, become or be image, in the digital age. The artworks created during this research are the foundations for the chapters of the thesis. Chapter One is led by the photographic series Modelling Selfies (In Paper Outfits) it explores the merging of differently dimensioned bodies to consider some of the labour involved in producing and consuming digital images. Chapter Two begins with deconstructed words and leads to a body of video works in which I pronounce terms used in selfie-making with the support of a mentor. The focus of this chapter is less about representation and more about the informational exchange, which underscores the digital age. The third and final chapter of the thesis commences with a number of protracted video works that sit under the title Gestures (for the selfie), this chapter continues to look at the body’s connections to the image, extending the discussion of labour, whilst examining the desire of living up to an image that is out of reach. The Image as a Template for Posing contributes to, and expands, contemporary thinking about selfie-making, through a practice-led focus. Within my video and photographic self-portraits other peoples' selfie-like images become vehicles for the study of present and ubiquitous digital image-making practices and how these intersect with new modes of subjectivity, representation, and the staging of everyday life. In my artworks I attempt to fit and follow the confines of selfies to examine image-consumption and production systems of exchange, spotlighting the connections and tensions between bodies and images, in the digital age. My project offers a new contribution to contemporary thinking about prosumer ‘self-portraiture’ at the intersections of photography, performance studies and labour
Multi-objective evolutionary architectural pruning of deep convolutional neural networks with weights inheritance
No full textDespite the ongoing success of artificial intelligence applications, the deployment of deep learning models on end devices remains challenging due to the limited onboard computational resources. A way to tackle this challenge is model compression through network pruning, which removes unnecessary parameters to reduce model size without significantly affecting performance. However, existing iterative methods require designated pruning rates and obtain a single pruned model, which lacks the flexibility to adapt to devices with heterogeneous computational capabilities. This paper considers network pruning in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) and proposes a novel algorithm for structured filter pruning in DCNNs using a multi-objective evolutionary approach with a novel weights inheritance scheme and representation scheme to reduce the time cost of the optimization process. The proposed method provides solutions with multiple levels of tradeoff between performance and efficiency for various hardware specifications on edge devices. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in optimizing popular DCNN models in terms of model complexity and accuracy. Notably, the framework successfully made significant reductions in floating-point operations ranging from 40% to 90% of VGG-16/19 and ResNet-56/110 with negligible loss in accuracy on the CIFAR-10/100 dataset
Painting after the internet: Networked materialities
Get PDFThis practice-led PhD thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of painting after the internet that departs with post-medium and post-internet discourses. As this thesis will show, such discourses function by identifying painting with an ultimate ontological reference point that serves to justify painting’s ongoing survival. Defined within these paradigms, the sensual-material nature of practice is either disregarded as an inessential attribute in favour of the concept, or otherwise generalised into an event of possibility in the virtual realm, and hence art has no place for itself. Critically, this thesis turns towards Barad, Golding and Stengers for an alternative approach, able to re-articulate the present as the local interference of continua or radical matter which is no longer reducible to an ultimate. This is emphasised within the thesis by the move from “network painting” as an aesthetic category to networked materialities: that is, instead of theorising practices as variably related identities, reality is a matter of mutually constituting entities. Thus, this thesis encourages one not to think the ultimate but to think painting in terms of the specific finite forms of its organisation, which are radically material. Attending to the developments of my own practice helps make apparent the material conditions of practice-led research outside of representationalism, shifting the focus to how artworks and arguments cohere, emerging as material- discursive phenomena. Importantly, humour is re-conceptualised as giddiness, a vector of sensuous experimentation, which pertains to a practice’s ongoing and problematic nature and helps to reframe assumptions concerning the anxiety of the artist in an increasingly connected world. Hence, this research offers a new paradigm for thinking and making contemporary painting that simultaneously accounts for the impact of new technologies, whilst situating painting as central to art practice
In common: Housing coalitions for producing, owning and living in London
Get PDFThe thesis starts with a simple proposition: What if housing were a common? A pre-modern English custom of land ownership and use, the notion of the commons has reemerged in recent architectural debates as a participatory ecology for production, ownership, and use. The thesis explores their transfor- mative value in addressing the much-needed change in London’s housing context today. In that sense, grassroots efforts promise not only more accessible housing economies but also architecturally valuable models for owning, sharing, and dwelling. Most importantly, they challenge modern preconceptions that form the foundation of how residents relate to housing, land, and each other. While existing architectural scholarship focuses mostly on hierarchically planned housing, grassroots sharing cultures and their spatial imaginaries remain little studied. The research aims to explore this gap by discussing the relationship of the commons with architecture. The thesis consists of two parts that employ different but interconnected methods. The first part establish- es the theoretical and historical context. A historical case study analysis reconstructs a genealogy of hous- ing commons in London. The second part draws on qualitative methods to discuss the Lewisham-based community land trust RUSS and its inaugural housing project, Church Grove. The thesis concludes that housing commons are yet to emerge in London. To achieve autonomy, hous- ing projects need to connect with other realms and scales of commoning. This is addressed by the intro- duction of the term coalitions, which refers to spaces and practices that allow for multiple commoning systems to link up. To support the commons, architectural practitioners and researchers need to embrace more coalitional roles, connecting different actors and local relational networks. Then architectural prac- tice can become a common itself
Ecological citizen(s) preferable futures deck
Get PDFThe deck was developed by the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ team, from perspectives in and for the United Kingdom. The network unites diverse groups through accessible technology and community centred approaches. It is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom (EP/ W020610/1). This deck aims to empower, foster collaboration, and inspire action toward a sustainable future. The deck provides a process to explore possibilities and turn them into action. ‘We’ and ‘you’ is used as an invitation to take part and be involved. We hope this deck inspires you to take bold actions, and shape interventions that turn dreams into reality