Thomas Hillier's research is a reflective interrogation of key aspects of his practice that investigates how speculative model making methods can be used to create instruments for thinking, didactic tools that through the process of ‘3-dimensional reconstruction’ can help uncover, explore and spatialise lost memories that in turn become something new altogether; tectonic representations of both his practice and of real, unreal and imagined new worlds.

 These delicate and precisely crafted instruments made entirely by hand with nothing, but white card collectively create the Hogshill Mead Series, named after Thomas’ childhood home where each of these memories and by extension instruments were born, acting as mnemonic devices that uncover, reveal and transfigure memories into spatial constructs, looking for new territories in architectural design and representation to create new architectural paracosms.

Philip Hudson has been working with Michael Talbot, Associate Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich to replicate an 18th Century Ottoman tombstone which is currently held by the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust. 

The original tombstone itself is a late-eighteenth century artifact made of limestone or marble featuring Ottoman Turkish inscriptions in the sülüs calligraphic style. The tombstone’s origin is not clear, but it was possibly brought back from Constantinople as a memento by a British officer in the 19th century. The inscription features a poetic composition reflecting the youth and untimely death of its owner. 

The tombstone was scanned and captured as a 3D digital model - from which 3D printed moulds were produced and then cast into with Jesmonite. Replicating the tombstone comprised of the following steps of Scanning, 3D Printing and Casting. 

The collaboration between the University of Greenwich History Department, Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust and Captivate aims to allow a museum artifact to be brought out into the community for people to touch, feel and see up close. The result is a final replica similar in touch and weight to the original.

As physical, analogue design and building practices progress into alternative mediums of the virtual, the architect’s role in more contemporary worlds of space-making becomes widely contested. From drawing to film to the digital and immersive, new-media landscapes reshape how architecture and our built environment are conceived, constructed, and experienced. Eric Wong's interdisciplinary explorations as an architect world-building for Japanese animation auteur, Director Mamoru Hosoda and beyond, questions the Western-centric focus of architectural discourse and practice and reassesses the contemporary meanings and practices of the virtual. 

Embedded in methods of drawing, writing, interviews, and archival research, an autoethnographic inquiry of practice-based reflections, real-time explorations, and design-based investigations establishes critical tools for the contemporary architect to assume the role of a world-builder. At the forefront of this research, the world-building architect is actively recognised as a valuable discipline in shaping expansive, inclusive, and inspiring contributions to architectural imaginaries, and built environments of the virtual.

www.ericwong.co.uk
@ericwong_folio

Dr J.C. Kristensen, is part of the team awarded the 2024 D&AD Wood Pencil for the project to rename the London Overground lines.

Announcing the changes in February, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the £6.3 million rebrand was being carried out to make it easier for passengers to find their way on the Overground and to celebrate London’s culture and recent history. A citywide co-creation project led to names that celebrate what Londoners are proud of. The lines new names are: Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty

This was an opportunity to contribute to naming a major part of London's infrastructure for generations, and to do so in a way which honoured London's histories, cultures and communities, does not cross a researcher’s desk very often. As the Cultural Research Lead, I co-designed the research method, interviewed experts on London, covering topics such as migration, LGBTQ+ history, women’s suffrage, transport, language and slang, and its psychogeography, and conducted the research in local and national archives.

Throughout this project, I thought often of my grandmother, a young woman from Forest Hill, who, in 1945, married a Norwegian sailor who had been exiled in London following the German invasion and occupation of Norway. Within weeks of its liberation, my grandparents left London and moved to Norway, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Fru Kristensen loved London with a passion, often talking about window shopping at Liberty’s, or walking through the City on her way to work as a secretary at the Bank of England. When I arrived in London to study at university as an eighteen-year-old, I understood immediately why she adored this city so much. I think she would have been immensely surprised -- and maybe even a little proud -- at how her love for London and all of its people and stories played such a role in shaping a researcher on this project.

TfL Overground Naming

Jim Hobbs & Ojon (Jonno Crabbe) will be performing “H(xy)/V(z)=Ø” as part of Mono No Aware’s Exhibition of Cinema Arts in Brooklyn, New York, USA on 7 December. 

H(xy)/V(z)=Ø stems from one of Hobbs’ earlier filmic installations where the work developed from an interest in grids (used for measuring/placing), aspects of the “nocturnal”  and the use of artificial lighting to create or enhance an augmented form of vision. The recollected experience of being blinded by lights while driving at night is the catalyst for a series of loosely linked moving images and graphics which in turn create a type of hallucinatory experience. The original film was projected onto a monumental blackboard surface which was enhanced with a hand-drawn grid made with engineers’ chalk. The structure/screen relates to Hobbs’ father’s work at General Electric, where automotive lighting was tested out by projecting street scenes onto a gridded wall and then shining automotive head lamps onto it – measuring the technical/numerical/visual range of the light while also destroying the superficially projected image. 

With H(xy)/V(z)=Ø, this destruction/dismantling of image through projection onto a marked grid creates a physically disorientating phenomena. The audio for the work was composed of collected sounds using an electromagnetic microphone to pick up invisible sonic currents from light sources including automotive lamps and handheld torches which were then run through a variety of analogue effects pedals and digital filters.  These audio files were then mixed by Ojon (Jono Crabbe) into the final sound work.

In Me and My Digital Twin, a one-off podcast documentary from BBC World Service, Ghislaine Boddington, Senior Researcher at the University of Greenwich, embarks on an immersive journey into the evolving realm of digital human twins, a frontier that marries cutting-edge technology with our deepest sense of self. This BBC World Service documentary, airing on November 30th, introduces listeners to the profound potential of creating a digital version of oneself, exploring what it might mean to have an AI-enabled twin that could support, reflect, and even extend life beyond physical existence. For Boddington, this digital twin is more than a mere avatar; it is a co-author of one’s story, a presence that grows and evolves alongside its human counterpart, offering guidance, companionship, and enduring representation.

Boddington’s research work on the The My AI Hybrid BioTwin project underpins this documentary, drawing on her extensive background in performance, digital identity, and body-responsive technologies. As a pioneer in digital immersion and the integration of virtual and physical experiences, Boddington has spent decades blending dance, technology, and human expression. Her artistic work with body>data>space and her role as a senior researcher at the University of Greenwich informs her exploration of how AI and biometrics could redefine identity and connection in the digital age.

BBC WORLD SERVICE - The Documentary
Title: Me and My Digital Twin
Written and Presented by: Ghislaine Boddington

"Critical Shifts," is a group exhibition reinterpreting the notion of displacement in contemporary culture, will be held at Barin Han art centre in Istanbul, Turkey.

The exhibition challenges conventional understandings of displacement, presenting it as a vital and dynamic force in shaping contemporary existence. While displacement often connotes challenges of contemporary conditions—migration, exile, or colonial extraction—"Critical Shifts" explores the creative potential within these shifts, celebrating the possibilities they offer for transformation and renewal.

“Displacement of people and matter may have become a common place within contemporary artistic and social context, yet most often it is associated with challenging conditions of migration or colonial extraction. With “Critical Shifts”  we propose to go beyond the fractures and dislocations into the possibilities of the new, when the shifted and the displaced is celebrated in its creativity and acknowledged as the new constant”, – the curatorial team states.

The choice of Istanbul and Barin Han art centre, located at the heart of the Old City, is also crucial as no other city can represent such powerful shifts and collision of displacements in its various forms and histories – between people and landscapes, land and water, the old and new, the historical and the contemporary. Taking up Barin Han four floors, Critical Shift follows the shifting narrative from works that measure the chaos, through works that deconstruct the old, culminating in the idea of shifting as a new constant.

Curators: Maria Korolkova, Margarita Osepyan, and Kate Umnova Artists: Greta Alfraro, Rong Bao, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Burçak Bingöl, Gülizar Çepoğlu, Marjolijn Dijkman, Sinem Dişli, FRAUD, Jim Hobbs, Merve İşeri, Saodat Ismailova, Ege Kanar, Jiabao Li, Marie-Luce Nadal, Yağiz Özgen, Julien Prévieux, Sümer Sayin, Pip Thornton, Dimitri Venkov, Emma Waltraud Howes, Cansu Yıldıran

Photo: Sümer Sayin - 'Island(s) of Escape', installation fragment, 2022

"Banal Devices", curated as an integral part of the international conference, presented a dynamic showcase of interdisciplinary works by an international group of artists and academics. Aligned with the conference's exploration of hybrid arts, the exhibition underscored the synergy between artistic practice, technology, and academic research. Participants engaged with the themes of 'the banal', digital culture, and creative experimentation, offering (mostly) screen-based works that reflected the conference's core panel discussions. 

The exhibition serves as an important contribution to the field, as it examines the concept of 'banality' in relation to both obsolete and emerging technologies. By exploring how everyday technological artefacts gain or lose significance over time, it not only contextualises our evolving digital landscape but equally opens up innovative pathways for research into how visual culture is constantly transformed with technological advances. This approach inspires new inquiry into how we engage with technology as a creative medium, a cultural artefact, and an everyday necessity.

"DRHA 2024 / Banal Devices - everyday technology in globalised technocultures", Exhibition - Reaktorhalle, Munich, 2024 curated by Dr Elena Papadaki.

“Women’s Collectives” was part of a session at the International Planning History Society Biannual Conference that took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 2024. The session, co-chaired with Dr Wes Aelbrecht (Cardiff University), examined the relationship between visual methodologies and the production and dissemination of histories. Across all disciplines, there are calls to decolonize and decarbonize, address issues of gender, ethnicity, and climate, and foster more inclusive and accessible discussions about knowledge production and dissemination. We believe that photography can offer access to marginalized and diverse viewpoints, while recognizing the multiplicity and ambiguity of these attributes. By accepting that photographs are “dynamic, difficult, slippery” (Edwards, 2022), and by adopting a nuanced approach to image interpretation, the session explored the historian's role in producing histories. It questioned what insights can images offer into marginalized groups or untold histories, in light of a historical record that is inherently selective and biased? 

Laura Bowie’s contribution focused on Helke Sander’s semi-autobiographical film The All-Around Reduced Personality (1977), which follows a collective of women photographers were working on a documentary photography commission about West Berlin: “Women Photographers See their City”. In a city where urban planning was directly connected to the global political agenda, and as the physical confrontation between East and West, the women’s response was multifaceted; they wanted to use photography as a tool to discover the similarities across both sides of the Berlin Wall, in both urban experience and agenda. In so doing, they were challenging the prevailing narratives of the city, the Wall as an impermeable barrier and the communist East as the direct antithesis to the capitalist West. The women saw photography as a means through which an “alternative society” could be documented, and the voices of those marginalised could find space in the city. The group subsequently created billboards of their images to command “visual presence in the city”; a counter-image of Berlin depicting a more authentic representation of the urban space as experienced by the women that demanded the attention of the public.

The research, therefore, analyses the importance of the collective as a non-hierarchical collaboration in questioning the urban project through a participatory approach, as a means through which more diverse and inclusive interactions with visual sources can offer alternative histories of the urban. The paper demonstrated how marginalised approaches to urban history can be illuminated by visual sources. Initially, the research is to be published as part of a special issue of Planning Perspectives, titled “Through the Camera Lens: Photography's Role in Shaping Planning Histories” with Dr Wes Aelbrecht of Cardiff University. 

Image Caption: 
Film poster for Helke Sander (dir) Redupers - Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit (Berlin: Basis-Film, 1978) © Helke Sander

'Landscape Encounters' is a research project run by Anushka Athique + Hannah Lammin, which explores how our bodies interact with landscapes. It asks the question: how can embodied creative practices enable us to empathise with other species and reinstate a more empathetic relationship with the ecosystems we operate within? 

The project aims to develop an innovative methodology for community engagement that enhances participants’ awareness of their entanglement with other species.  It seeks to encourage a sense of empathy with the more-than-human world through inclusive and situated creative practice.  

On the 9 + 10 of July we ran a residential workshop at Wilderness Wood in Sussex to test these ideas. Over the 2-days we investigated our embodied relations with the wooded-world and how this differs from other species. Moving-through and observing-with the landscape, we worked together to imagine the life-worlds of other types of beings, whilst also examining our own ways of being. We documented the affective transmissions between ourselves and others using drawing, writing, making and movement. And we prototyped bodily attachments, using  a selection of simple materials (cardboard, cord, wire, wadding, etc., and other materials found in the landscape) that would alter our sensoria, amplifying or occluding particular senses, or re-shaping body parts to change how they affect/are affected by their surroundings, through this we explored inhabiting the landscape otherwise.'

Collectarium (Sophie Beard + Allyson Waller) exhibit at the interactive festival NOW PLAY THIS, Somerset House, New Wing Gallery, London, 6-14 April 2024. 

Selecting 3 contributions from the Lockdown Space Collection Collectarium created participatory activities responding to the festivals theme of “Liminality: Playing between worlds” - an invitation to think of PLAY as a place both for introspection and connection. Encouraging self-reflection, the interactive festival explored the transitory, borderless spaces between artist’s imaginations and audiences' inner worlds. 

The Lockdown Space collection invited people to submit observations on how their home environment had changed during lockdown. Domestic spaces became extraordinary through the way in which people had to rapidly re-imagine their homes. The collection documents these unusual temporary and ‘in-between’ liminal spaces. The domestic home became the place where we work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape. 

The project is in collaboration with Peter Maloney. Thanks to the original contributors: N Rodriguez (Indoor Hopscotch), Madeline Tanoto (Pineapple Dance) & Kerri Burton (Stair Slide) and to Artistic Director Luján Oulton, Lead producer Nick Murray, Assistant producer, Susie Buchan & tech lead Jo Summers.

Silvio Carta was keynote speaker at Datathink 2024 / AI & Cities: Sampling the Past, Interpreting the Present in Future Tense as a part of the Winter School organised by the Max Planck Institute for Art History, in Rome. The presentation took place at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the event was organised by the Max Planck Society and hosted by the University of Zurich.

The presentation addressed timely societal and urban questions related to AI and new technologies including: How do algorithmic techniques like deep learning and computer vision challenge or complement existing methods in fields like architecture, urban studies, and architectural and urban history? What new questions and blindspots emerge? As urban data extraction and analysis grows increasingly automated, how does this transform disciplinary notions of evidence, objectivity, and knowledge production? How do algorithmic interfaces, predictive policing, and automated urban management systems constrain or enable social justice claims and aspirations in the city?

Cloud Data is multidisciplinary project that aims to explore the intersection of associative intelligence and creative thinking in neural networks. Led by Dr Maria Korolkova in collaboration with the artist-curator Kate Umnova and machine engineer Artem Konevskikh, the project focuses on machine-human imagination, represented as a thousand-year-old guessing game of cloud watching. 

It begins with development of a software that uses machine vision to conduct visual analysis of clouds in the sky and the associations they evoke through the lens of AI and human imagination. The extracted human-made metaphors are mixed with the metaphors collected from image captioning neural networks. The resulting text prompts are then used to generate imagery that reveal the machine's subconscious imagination. By combining human-made and machine-generated metaphors, Cloud Data encourages viewers to question their understanding of perception of nature and the role of AI in shaping it.

The AHRC-funded p_ART_icipate project investigates the effect of participatory arts on social connectedness and best practices in the design and facilitation for participatory online interfaces. Led by Dr Oliver Gingrich at the University of Greenwich, with research partners Claire Grant, Trust Head of Arts Psychotherapies at Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Prof. Dominik Havsteen-Franklin at Brunel University and collaborators National Gallery, Royal National Institute for the Blind, Analema Group, NeuroCreate, Queen Mary University and the Noise Abatement Society. 

The project asks important questions regarding the facilitation of participatory arts online with a focus on vulnerable groups. Can online-facilitated, participatory art contribute to perceived social connectedness? What are best practices in participatory art facilitation in online, collaborative conditions? What are specific challenges experienced by vulnerable groups during online facilitation of participatory art, and how are they best addressed? 

The p_ART_icipate research project has been supported by the an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Research standard grant.

This is a FOREST tells the story of 50 sites from across the city of Leeds that have the potential to be forests. These lands currently exist as in-between spaces, seemingly dormant, many locked in bureaucratic loopholes and murky ownership structures, some fenced-off for over 20 years, others waiting until they reach their desired financial value. The exhibition documents the journey to understand these sites, articulating the complexities of our place-based value relations with land, and offering, where possible, new possibilities for the spaces of Leeds and the communities that share them.   

A series of interventions by artists including Invisible Flock, Anushka Athique, Vandria  Borari, Nwando Ebizie, Outi Pieski and Jenni Laiti take place in the gallery and on a selection of sites which have formed part of the search. These works range from text-based banners visible from train lines, large ceramic sculptures placing alternative value systems onto brownfield sites and acts of collective ritual and mourning.    

Forest Bodies – We Are Forest and A Walk with The Forest are two pieces by Anushka Athique, commissioned specifically for the exhibition, builds on some of the projects central questions to do with value and ownership whilst also unravelling new ones. The two pieces present a visual-poetic exploration of the transgression between body and land. Conceived of in three voices Forest Bodies explores non-cognitive relationships and combines both artistic and academic methodologies. Forest Bodies invites the viewer to consider how we might make a forest, how we experience the forest and asks what if we held the forest within our bodies?

Forest Bodies by Anushka Athique was commissioned as part of This is a FOREST by Invisible Flock Co-produced by Leeds 2023 and Invisible Flock. Made possible with National Lottery Heritage Fun Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For the first time, the Venice Biennale included the Biennale College Architettura, which ran from June 25 to July 22, 2023. Fifteen renowned international tutors - Samia Henni, Marina Otero, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Thireshen Govender, Lorenzo Romito, Jacopo Galli, Philippa Tumubweinee, Ngillan Gbadebo Faal, Rahesh Ram, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Urtzi Grau, Samir Pandya, Alice Clancy, Sarah de Villiers, and Manijeh Verghese - worked with fifty students, early career practitioners, and academics from around the world on the theme of decolonisation and decarbonisation. 

Rahesh Ram, co-wrote a brief called Radical Empathy: Human Vessels & Fabulous Outpourings that asked precipitants to look at other forms of knowledge (knowledge that has previously been marginalised), such as indigenous knowledge and use it a creative and working methodology.  This knowledge was used to create a film that asks the viewers to empathise with Monsters, a symbol of human and non-human condition.