Season of the Orb is an ongoing video project about prediction. It compares technologies of control with the anthropological purpose of myth, prophecy and divinatory practices. The work explores the influence of subjective expectation and fatalism on the fluidity of identity, in a cultural moment dominated by personal branding, statistical prediction, and existential anxiety about our future. Centring on complex natural systems and the variety of predictive methods that have been developed in relation to it, the work looks at the continuity from premodern spiritual practices into early modern scientific inquiry in the west, positioning the history of science as a cultural process of knowledge production.

Through a fragmented set of narratives that mix fact with anecdote, the videos present prediction as a process of narrativisation itself. This opens space to wrestle with our malleability as individuals and collectives; to reassert what Mark Fisher termed “the plasticity of reality”. The work looks to forms of group consciousness that shift focus toward the more-than- human, to new relations that accommodate multiplicities without necessitating regimes of control, a space for interpretation that sits comfortably with the unknown.

Drift Compass reconstitutes the Situationist International’s concept of Dérive for a contemporary urban environment. By subverting modern technologies of way-finding, the work opens a path of discovery that combines the psycho-geographic with the psycho-technologic. As we increasingly relinquish our sense of physical orientation over to digital applications and corporate entities, the work seeks to push in the opposite direction by encouraging a discovery of something unexpected that may be just around the corner.

The work consists of a web app that is freely available online, alongside an ongoing series of video works that document a single journey through a single city, wherein the participants reflect on the changing nature of urban life there in the face of ever present gentrification, and the neo-liberalisation of so many European cities. By involving those with an ongoing connection to the city, the video works aim to demonstrate the power of memory in relation to place.

Suntopia is an ongoing collaborative world-building project that explores what futures may result from a green transition in global energy relations. The project is built around a speculative, poly-vocal fiction that asks what a fully solar-powered world could be. The work combines a multitude of fragmented narratives via a set of multimedia contributions from multiple authors into a pluralistic depiction of the way energy production impacts the economic, cultural and spiritual structures that give shape to our humanity.

Initially developed through a collaboration between Yujin Joung, Sandu Cojocari, Rawan Khater, Nawon Koo and myself, the project formed part of The Metabolic Sublime — a workshop at Medialab Matadero in Madrid. We now intended to invite further contributions from a widening collective of writers and creatives, to craft a rich archive that supercedes the sum of its parts.

Raising questions about machine consciousness and non- human creativity, Wool-gather brings together aeromancy, folk- lore, day-dreaming and cloud watching through machine learning and image processing. Designed as a site specific installation, the work interprets the shapes of the clouds in the sky to generate meandering anecdotes and tell whimsical stories about the future.

Wool-gather combines an object detection classifier with a large language model, trained on a variety of folktales from around the world. By feeding the output of these two machine learning models into one-another, the work explores computational subjectivities and the ongoing contingency of inspiration. The work contrasts artificial generative systems with the creative power of nature, framing the atmosphere as an emergent process through the lens of technological sensation.

Presenting the feeds from open access real-time live streams available across the internet, Silver Coord is a VR work that presents fluctuating visions from around the world. The work draws inspiration from the esoteric practice of astral projection, providing a different way to access the real world via the virtual.

By offering a slower, more meditative space to contrast the everyday world of Instagram and Zoom the work invites audiences to consider simultaneous temporalities through a traversal of physical locations. As every corner of the earth becomes more and more observed, measured, and controlled, this work looks to repurpose tools of surveillance as an opportunity for personal reflection.

Cone of Power is a video work exploring extractive capitalism, systems of control and collective acts of resistance. The work combines footage from recent protest movements in Hong Kong, United States and Myanmar, with clips that document methods of industrial production. Through CCTV footage, object detection algorithms and diagrammatic 3D renderings, the work explores the role moving images have within late capitalism. Looking to the cone of power ritual for inspiration, the work revolves around questions of what covens we can form and what powers we can focus.

Supercollager is a reflection on photography and image- making in dialogue with computer vision and machine learning. The work draws on Barthes’ theory of the punctum and studium, alongside Vilém Flusser’s concept of the apparatus and the technological program. It seeks to repurpose a number of computational techniques, converting them from analytical tools into expressive and generative methods that craft new images from the corpus of my own personal photography archive.

It plays with the mnemonic temporality of photography, combining fragments of images taken at different instants. Through ongoing iterations of the underlying software, the visual output from this work fluctuates with different aesthetics and visual forms. In this way, the software abstracts a secondary layer of visuality that situates these images in new relationships with one another through its own sense of composition.

You can see more images from this project in a post I made here

Produced in collaboration with writer/curator Alisa Blakeney, A Tree Grew Through My Window looks at models of co-existence beyond the human built environment by look at more-than- human forms of architecture. By investigating non-human structures, social organisations, and perceptions, the work seeks to ask the question: what relations of care can be cultivated to address environmental devastation?

Centred within the rich a varied context present on the island of Taiwan, the work features excerpts from a number of texts found while researching Taiwanese culture, history and indigenous cosmology. This textual source material was then combined with found images and video to produce a single- channel video and a risograph zine. Switching between English and Mandarin, the form allows these ideas to be presented in multiple temporalities and through a space of cultural exchange.

The work was exhibited at Taipei Artist Village in September 2019.

Audio narrated by 莊聿萱 with assistance from 鍾盈盈.

Translation by 韞藝術工作室 Yun Art Studio.

Produced as part of the inaugural Computational Art Residency, in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum and Goldsmiths College, Object Permanence is an investigation into the legacies of colonial atrocity that exist in institutional archives.

By cross-referencing historical dates, names and places against key fields in the V&A's digital database, the work draws out objects from the museum's collection acquired during three specific acts of British colonial aggression: the First Indian War for Independence in 1857, the sacking of the Summer Palace in China during 1860, and the Maqdala expedition into Ethiopia in 1868.

Presented at the V&A's Digital Design weekend 2018, the work projected photographs of these objects on to screens made of the same material that wraps the objects in storage. Around this were placed free standing speakers, each playing found audio explaining the history and historical aftermath of the historical events.

Gail is a chatbot that was developed as part of The Bureau of Meteoranxiety project, in collaboration with Olivia Tartaglia and Alex Tate. It was exhibited as part of Next Wave festival at the Blindside Gallery, Melbourne in 2018.

The work allowed participants to discuss their anxieties about climate change. It used implementations of conversational AI that are becoming increasingly common as a way for corporations to scale their customer services, whilst laying off real employees. As such, the clinical uncaring nature of the bot is often less than comforting and the conversations err on the side of the strange and alienating.

Review of Gail and The Bureau of Meteoranxiety via The Guardian

Ratio Club was a free ten-week workshop program exploring computation as creative practice. Participants took part in a series of sessions blending practical tutorials with critical discussions.

The workshops were structured to introduce creative practitioners to basic programming concepts, algorithmic approaches to digital design and modeling, and strategies for employing these in their artistic practice.

Final VR Showcase

Using machine-learning to craft personalised zines using sensitive data, Rrosetta asks a central question: what value do we place on a work of art in the age of big data?

This project examines questions of online identity by drawing the niche and often intimate subculture of self-publishing into wider debates about privacy, automation and AI.

Exhibited as a website and installation, the work invited participants to consent to having their sent emails read and analysed in exchange for a unique publication. These were generated and printed in the exhibition space for the participant to take home.

On The Side of Every Mountain Is Another, Smaller Mountain is a series of photographs presenting contemplative, brooding atmosphere that evokes geological deep time, depicting a set of dark rock protrusions into an ambiguous sky. The photographs were taken at dusk on the side of Cadair Idris in North Wales, where local legend holds that any who sleep on the side of the mountain will awake as either a madman or a poet. The work shows geology as a site of tension, both physically and creatively - with the fine line between inspiration and despair ever-present, just past the precipice.

A meditation on form and composition by treating digital images as a pliable surface.