2019

School Unrealness

Text & publication

When we mark out a ‘real world’ from within the school, we are implicit in the creation of a binary. School Unrealness excavates a space for potential and critique within the oppositional ‘real world’ and ‘unreal school’, locating a queer potentiality somewhere in between.

Through a series of essays and conversations, the study works towards proposing an unreal school by way of an ‘Educational Critique’, a theoretical framework underpinned by the employment of fiction as a critical methodology.

Purchase a printed copy via email.Online reader coming soon.

Department of Extension

Event & publication

The Department of Extension is an ‘unreal school’ and discursive event, focused on unsettling art and design education through symposia and workshops.

During its inaugural open day at Kingston School of Art, the Department invited Nina Paim (common-interest) and Kishan San (School of Speculation) to lead discussion around critical models of design education.

Extensions were then made beyond the Department’s physical walls to welcome Chris Lee and Ramon Tejada for presentations of their work on design historiography.

An open day guide was produced to house the Department’s schedule and supporting narrative. Fictional text Extensions narrates the Department’s ‘discovery’, and The Extension Effect revises Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Beaubourg essay, re-focusing its polemic and theory of a hyperreality onto the art school of today.

Read: Department of Extension (PDF)

Eliza Ludd & the Fog

Workshop & research

As part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s NEUHAUS curriculum, workshop Eliza Ludd & the Fog looked to collectively narrate our ‘New Dark Age’ through the excavation of a lost fiction.

The only non-male pseudonym deployed within the 19^th century Luddite revolts, is re-actioned within a contemporary mythology. Eliza Ludd & the Fog is a story already written, but yet to be told.

More information can be found here. Film by Het Nieuwe Instituut.

Letter A (trailer)

Film and sound

After the Cloud, came the Fog. In the advent of a new computational metaphor, a mythical figure from within the historic Luddite revolts is excavated and re-actioned. Two centuries after their reckoning letter, Eliza Ludd is hailed the Metaphor Breaker of our New Dark Age.

The ‘trailer’ is accompanied by soundscape Incantation by Fog, a machinic revision of Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s Incantation by Laughter (1912). Neologisms of the word fog look to draw out new meaning and caricature Big Data’s relentless jargoning.

Made in Dschermany

Exhibition identity [with Slavs & Tatars]

Made in Dschermany was presented at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

“Made in Dschermany extends Slavs and Tatars’ artistic practice into German orientalism, philology and the country’s complex relationship with Islam, through the perspective of four letters: DSCH.”

Wripped Scripped

Book design [with Slavs and Tatars]

Assistance with Stan de Natris.
Published by Hatje Cantz.

“Wripped Scripped continues the collective’s investigation of alphabets as an equally political and affective platform. While the roll-out of new alphabets has often accompanied the rise and fall of empires, the artists attempt to liberate not so much peoples and nations but rather the sounds and letters that make up langauge.”

More info: slavsandtatars.com

Topical Tales

Event with Alternative Art School

A one day lecture-workshop in collaboration with research platform ACED and the Royal College of Art. The event engaged with post-truth politics and the blurring of fact and fiction within design and journalistic practices. Speakers included Mould Map and Daniel Nørregaard.

Spatial design referenced news sandwich boards through the fastening of programmes and intersecting grids that framed critical quotes.

The workshop then employed rapid digital image production, responding to current affairs in a collective online collage.

Alternative Art School

Publication & research

Pedagogic research project, initiated by Kingston School of Art lecturer Dr Cathy Gale and adopted by myself and several other design students.

The project offered space within the institutional Graphic Design programme to unpack and toy with issues of art education and design practice through student-led symposia, inter-institutional workshops and pedagogic experiments.

Read: Alternative Art School (PDF)

States of Change

Exhibition identity with Sheona Turnbull

States of Change documented recent encounters with London and Berlin through an assembly of printed matter, photography and moving image.

Promotional material reflected the textural layering of Berlin fly-postering through a motif of typographic forms and colour extracted from material during a visit.