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Cathode ghosts
No full text‘Cathode Ghosts’ is an assemblage of synthetic voices in a fractured collage of drifting static. Half caught fragments of time and space reverberate in the void, a scattered spectral world at once omnipresent and yet only ever partially glimpsed. Daily life has become an immense accumulation of ghosts. The future is no more than a memory, everything that was directly lived is now haunted and what was once proven can now only be imagined. The piece invokes and summons ancient and future phantoms to re-haunt the empty spaces we will leave behind us
Archive sub-versions: Photography, the accident, and the biopolitics of extraction
Get PDFThe documentation of work accidents takes place in a tension between production and destruction, the archivable and the unarchivable, the biopolitical governing of labour and the speculative economics of capitalist Extractivism. This research, led by practice, takes a multi-disciplinary path to analyse the normalisation of work accidents through the study of photographic documents produced by a former coal mining company in the Northeast of France. These are now deposited in the public archives of the Centre des Archives Industrielles et Techniques de Moselle * which holds the greater part of the records yielded by Houillères du Bassin de Lorraine**, one of the nine regional sections of Charbonnages de France ***, the mining conglomerate disbanded in 2007. While a widely occurring social and economic reality, work accidents are paradoxically under-studied as is often acknowledged by sociological studies. The work accident highlights the contradiction in which the body of the worker is caught: while the biopolitical and industrial logics of extraction depends on its productive force, its exposure to the risk of injury or death is admissible, even normalised. Coal mining is considered as a particular historical incarnation of capitalist Extractivism which encompasses but is not limited to the extraction of natural resources. While extraction leads to capital accumulation, the work accident leads to its disruption or delay, and to a qualitatively different form of accumulation, that of documents. Photographic documents of work accidents are invaluable tools for a critical analysis of a form of power that legitimises the risk of injury and death at work, in the name of profit. The relationship between the work accident and photography is approached from the perspective of a biopolitical and dispositival analysis of corporate archival practices derived from Michel Foucault. A dispositival analysis emphasizes the heterogeneity of strategic mechanisms and techniques deployed by biopower to regulate the aleatory. Photography is understood as one such mechanism, inscribed in the material and infrastructural dispositif of the archival-industrial complex and in an economy of power relations. The research’s aim is twofold: to analyse how photographs of work accidents and of accidents simulations functioned as materially and logically correlated to the process of extraction; and to probe the tension between the normative effects of these photographs and the unruliness of an affective response to them by a viewer or an interpreter. Roland Barthes’ notion of punctum is invoked to account for the transformative power of affect and the emergence of an other value of the photographic document. I develop artistic methodologies engaging with the archive conceived as an infrastructural ensemble – itself deriving from a past industrial extractive complex – while reenvisioning photographic reproducibility in a tension between the logistics of documentation and affective resonance. Such interventions endeavour to reconfigure archival consignation and give a formal expression to relations – between accidents, their documents, and subjects – that might have been obscured by corporate logics and, in this instance, the relocation of documents to the public archive. Keywords: (Work) Accidents, Affect, Archive, Biopolitics, Biopower, Extraction, Extractivism, Infrastructuralism, Photography. * The Industrial and Technical Archives Centre of Moselle. ** The Collieries of the Lorraine Basin. *** The French National Coal Board
Polymorph I
No full textPolymorph I is a confluence between forms of matter and generative Ai models, constituting emergent structures in motion, water, projection, print, light and sound.
With cameras, microphones and conductive hair as sensors, generated sound and light are entangled with the presence of observers and the proximal environment, in ways which transform the fixed trajectory of generative Ai models into dynamic flows of sensorial immersion. Data jumps fluidly across tangible and mediated modes: sound, light, motion and electricity blend into one another at different time scales according to an open logic of connection. Polymorph I is a curious deviation from developing conventions in generative Ai into expanded conditions of production and experience. 2023, SZN Gallery, London. Projection, sound, code, electronics, print, generative Ai
Dither - Tremble - Leap - Continue
Get PDFA generative audio program examining the use of noise and indeterminacy in connected systems to expand the conditions for emergence in sound. Dither, conventionally used as a technical method to prevent cascading errors in digital media, has its roots in the mechanical computers used to aim aerial munitions in the second world war and the aircraft vibrations which counterintuitively increased their accuracy. Here, the indeterminate variable of live ambient sound is amplified, distorted and distributed throughout the synthesised voices and processes, initiating a continually self-restructuring set of weighted connections between them. In this way, dither is reconfigured as a simultaneously dispersive and connective feature, enabling both radical leaps in proximal structure and persistent temporal cohesion. Published as Generative SuperCollider code in text. Audio example and code provided
Detail and whole, movement, colour, and form
No full textFor this project, I was granted exclusive permission to document the printing of the famous Rorschach inkblot cards, used in psychiatric experiments for just over a century. Not only is this the first time that anyone has ever documented the process, but it is also the only time that anyone will ever document the process: the next printing, in perhaps five years’ time, will be digital and not mechanical. This is a completely unique opportunity to support and undertake historic, ground-breaking primary research. For experimental reasons, the cards must not have been seen by the subject previously; each set must also be absolutely identical, or else the responses cannot be compared, and so rendering any experiment useless. For these reasons, the production of the cards is highly secretive, and this is the first time that anyone from outside the process has been allowed to witness it
Contracts as Protocols of Governmentality in Performance Art
Get PDFThis essay raises questions regarding meeting protocols as a form of art practice. Drawing on recent examples from my performance works, I initiate a discussion about how contracts in performance art might operate as protocols of governmentality, offering morphogenetic structures towards other ways of ‘meeting with’. The term ‘governmentality’ is used to designate all those ‘regulatory apparatuses (dispositives)’ that exercise power via protocols of economy and circulation, to engender new subjectivities (Foucault 2007), whereas the term ‘morphogenesis’ is employed to describe processes where the genesis of forms follows a sensuous logic of structural disposition or tendency that organizes disparities of potential events. One could argue that in the 1970s, several performance artists adopted contractual methods of negotiating their meeting with an audience in order to critically expose the power dynamics existing within everyday hierarchical relations (O’Dell 1998). In so doing, contracts often demarcated the roles of the artist and the audience from the outset of the live work, as already fixed, separate subjectivities, thus sustaining binary essentialist categories (for example subject vs. object, and so on) as met within the philosophical tradition of dialectics (Golding 2021). However, in my performance works brought forward, contracts operate as protocols of governmentality, offering morphogenetic structures governing the thickness and the porosity of boundaries within the ways that people come to meet with one another, without pre-determining any final outcomes or assigning specific roles to the parties involved. Contracts in this case establish a set of meeting protocols that generate and distribute intensities through the organization of areas of possibilities for the emergence of potential events. And it is within this shifting topography of events that subjectivities emerge through the ways that bodies affect and are affected by other bodies via processes of use
Engaged: A toilet on every high street
Get PDFPeople are the heart of the high street, but they need public toilets to spend more time participating in their community and the local economy. For older people, disabled people and those with young families, toilet access can help decide which high street to visit, or whether to visit at all. The Engaged concept aims to give councils a sustainable way of providing an inclusive, accessible public toilets that can support local demand, without the pitfalls of the traditional toilet block
Exploring generative design for assistive devices
Get PDFThis paper discusses the potential of applying generative design to assistive devic-es. The concept of a cyber-physical human system is presented. An example case of generative design to explore innovative design solutions with novel features is presented. Outstanding challenges and gaps in research are discussed
Border[s]lines between isolation and connection: The disused railway in Aberdeen
Get PDFAbandoned railways allow an interpretation of urban borders by considering different scales of connection and separation. The former railway line in Aberdeen is used as a case study to explore how urban linear connections represent a defining linear space and may postulate a socio-spatial statement. The linearity of abandoned railways as an urban design issue is recognised as a characteristic of urban isolation and connection. The contemporary city is no longer a compact and homogeneous entity; its fragmentation and diversity make it prone to rapid transformation. The fragmentation represented by urban voids results from rapid urbanisation and new modes of transportation. Urban infrastructures, particularly railways, often necessitate redesign and are subject to relocation due to urban conditions. This relocation results in abandoned lines and, later, linear voids representing new micro-borders within a city. Focusing on an urban void and a residual form of a spatial condition that resulted from an abandoned railway line in Aberdeen, its potential role in connecting historically isolated and fragmented neighbourhoods are considered through three case studies of the successful transformation of abandoned railways. These are analysed to highlight the potential to develop a methodological approach to conscious urban reuse by addressing the challenges of planning and structuring specific design methods to create a network of connections and reinforce the importance of reactivating surrounding areas and places
A material flow analysis of the UK clothing economy
Get PDFHistorically, clothing accounted for a significant proportion of annual income for most UK citizens, so items were carefully preserved and often passed down through generations. In the 21st century, however, just 40 min of work at minimum wage is sufficient to purchase a dress, shirt, or pair of trousers that may be discarded after a handful of uses. UK per-capita clothing consumption is 2–3 times the global average, reliant on international supply chains associated with many environmental and social issues. Steering the clothing system towards ecological sustainability requires wide-ranging strategies, but the lack of data on flows of clothing makes it difficult to quantify the impacts of current production and consumption, let alone design and evaluate sustainability interventions. Here we use material flow analysis to track clothing flows through the UK economy as a prelude to considering embodied carbon and changes in economic value across the system. Our results show the system is characterised by relatively high rates of reuse but very low rates of recycling. More clothing is destroyed (via landfill and incineration) than is reused and recycled. Consequently, reducing consumption of new clothing by just ∼4% would be as effective for reducing waste as doubling current recycling activity. The UK also imports eight times more clothing than it produces, but offshores over half of the associated textile waste. In our carbon analysis, uncertainty is the key theme – estimates put the cradle-to-consumer emissions associated with 2018 UK clothing consumption anywhere from 9 Mt.CO2e to over 30 Mt.CO2e. Our economic analysis shows substantial, but unsurprising losses in economic value of clothing as it flows through the economy, with some unexpected nuances. Improving the accuracy of current flow and impact data is critical for understanding how the clothing system can be most effectively moved towards circularity