Typewriter art.
      

S.E.L.L.M.A - The South East London Luddite Metropolitan Association

“My daddy thinks us youths should stop always being on our phones.” 
    
    You’ll come for the ritual smashing of the machine, you’ll stay for the techno-critical discussion.
          

Design Degree Show

I had a major role in the design and organisation of our degree show this summer. 2022

Degree show website by moi.

Degree Project

The Auto-Automobile Behavioural Preferences and Human Agency Transfer Interface and User Guide

Urrrrrrr Let's say it's a project bashing Tech, automation, the idea of "human" or "User-centred design", and it was a means to an end. It was a making exercise, It was a writing exercise. It was perhaps good, until I had to describe what it was about again and again, and now I'm not sure. It was fun to research, hard to dissertate. And it was very me.

How would you describe the relationships you have with people you don't know? The first time you meet someone is key to their lasting impression of you. You may not think much about how many people you meet everyday, because what exactly is a meet? Consider technology, your phone, and how many people it meets on your behalf everyday. Are they meeting you for the first time when they see your profile, or do they meet your profile? When we use technology it takes our face, our words, and it repeats them back to itself and to others as a way to follow through our intentions. Or it doesn't, because it can't. How much of technology is just 'computer talking to computer', acting as a substitute to human interaction, because the world needs interactions to BE a society, but it is also sometimes inconvenient for humans to have to do it. 

On a road with autonomous cars, there is plenty of interaction, but between people, machines and machines. We understand the way we are perceived without knowing how. The cars choices on the road are pre-determined in code based on the designers legacy understanding of the function and interaction of people in cars, operating via the human authority of the owner/operator and the corporate manufacturer.
                        
The Auto-Automobile Behavioural Preferences and Human Agency Transfer Interface and User Guide - Is my way of thinking about our complexifying-simplifying relationship with tech, specifically the change in our relationship with cars with the development of driverless technology. We must try to consider the way technology is developed and how it will effect what there is already, to prevent convenience beyond logic and human existence.

BA Design third year blog. DOES NOT REALLY WORK ON UR PHONE.

Draft article for Disegno Journal, written while on placement. Summer 2021
        
When ascending the escalators at Oxford Circus underground station, you are glaringly made aware of the LED advertising displays on the wall, each one with a different swim-suited model figure with confetti blasting around them, a first name and a titanium white smile. These are to be this years love island contestants, each one I now personally know from my way up to the surface. Love Island has become the "nation's favourite reality TV series" in recent years, garnering major hype and viewing numbers. A bit like Big Brother, a bit like Married At First Sight, Love Island isolates about a dozen people in a house in Spain for a month, the contestants partner up into "relationships" and the public occasionally vote out people they don't like. The tube advertising immediately struck me as eerily dystopian, how similar it felt to The Hunger Games and the smiling contestants of the competition to kill and win. how completely distorted has our media consumption become, everywhere I go there is Love Island; the tube, the internet, the TV. An app allows me to rate and vote which contestants are allowed to stay on with the show. we can slander one contestant for having a dodgy knee when walking up the stairs and gain abundant likes on twitter. we can be happy when one contestant we don't like has to sleep in one bed with another one that makes them feel uncomfortable.
On Monday night, my house had a kind of viewing party for Love Island. I wasn't sure I wanted to attend but having begun to realise a strong feeling for the aura around love island, I couldn't refuse. The show starts with slow-mo orbital shots of each "islander", seemingly stood in front of a large fan(or the room they're in has a bad draft) as they describe themselves. I know that they're being interviewed, that they're answering questions, I can hear, it in their voices. But there are no questions being asked and the "islanders" look to one side of the camera, not intimidatingly into the camera, they're not talking to us, the contestants are talking to the show and as though to one another before having even met. It amazes me how finely tuned reality TV has become, disconnecting the viewer from the people inside the box, they are distant, isolated, untouchable.
Big Brother amazed me, it was epic because it was so self aware, likening its format to the illusive Big Brother of Orwell's 1984, who can be inferred as really the conservative rules set collectively in society, how we judge and belittle each other. The people on it can understand that it is a surreal environment. it is insane the amount of shite that can go into a show like this post-Big Brother, Love island is a different story entirely to Big Brother because of the construct of infrastructure which builds up the world around the oblivious contestants
Love Island is less lucid than Big Brother. Less directly do the public become the masters of the contestants in the box, rather the "islanders" blindly perform, competing against each other yet partnered up. Big Brother was a simple popularity contest, the contestants could just as easily win by playing up to the public than trying to beat the other contestants of the show. In Love Island though, the "islanders" play exclusively with and against each other and in the context of relationships, something which I think is horrible as it encourages manipulative behaviour, social doubt and betrayal. Perhaps it's because I'm a romantic but I hate that. As absurd as it may sound, a comparison for me is Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games in which the contestants are placed in an arena to fight each other, partnered up but ultimately doomed to betray even their teammates, because at the end of the love island series the winning pair has a chance to win the full prize and backstab one another.
    
And like in the Hunger Games, the public is some how enamoured of, yet uncaring for the contestants. The show is to be consumed and contestants with it.
Love Island drains me of life, as my mind and body is destroyed by the viewing experience, my soul is torn out by the stream of tweets and replies that void any practice of civility recognisable in modern society.
Today, television flow is in sharp decline, particularly among younger generations, but Love Island isn't a show, it is a spread of media, with an analysis show, social media presence on every site, hashtags, podcast and an app.
The app, oh the love island app! Seamlessly merging the advertising motivations of free-to-air public television with the current society-wide addiction to social media and trend following. Our Gen-Viz attention spans limit us to a minute of television screen time, then a minute doom scroll then repeat. How would I know what to think of each "islander" if not for the myriad of responses and takes that ooze from my phone at a constant, never ceasing pace. Comments on every little thing that pick apart these very normal, very very normal people. ITV knows this, the show is slow with potentiality on purpose, why edit the show to pack it with content when people do that themselves, for each other. Twitter content is siphoned off, users are pulled away from it and drawn to the Love Island app, offering easier "insight" into public opinion with polls and select trending social media posts. Once on the app, you are accosted with branding, merchandise and general crap which features on the show. "take the which islander are you? test" I'm a Brad, or a Kaz, depending, I suppose, on what genitalia I sport, maybe I should buy the Kaz water bottle? The same one she uses in the show. Or maybe the Brad luggage? Or some Feather and Down Sweet Dreams Pillow Spray 100ml? Every possible thing you can see in every corner, every cupboard, on every table, you can buy it on the app. Not like an amazon page with products on white backgrounds, the "islanders" have been choreographed in using and stooping to pick up each item so that a picture to feature on the app can be there. The pictures are each from actual show footage and have a red circle around the item, like on the news when they are pointing out a criminal in a crowd. The next comparison is, of course, The Truman Show. Truman Burbank grows up surrounded by inserted advertisements, unaware that he is himself in a reality TV show that follows him and choreographs every moment of his life with actors and set. The film acts to show the absurdity of reality TV and the cruel judgement of the camera. He was a living breathing advertisement, viewers could call in and order anything from around Truman, Love Island goes beyond even this with it's app and the choice dress up as each contestant in a show of support or identity alignment. I think again of The hunger Games, how viewers could pay money to buy things in support for contestants they liked. How love and support(natural human notions you have when seeing distress or sadness(even when behind a screen)) are acts only made achievable through a pay wall. Of course The Hunger Games organisers could not be evil because they facilitated you in helping the the contestants! But the point is they are evil, only because of them are the contestants in distress to begin with. Love Island is the same, viewers can emotionally connect with the "islanders" but are distanced from them through the screen, only achieving a sense of nearness by voting for them on the app or purchasing items exclusive to them.
It will make Impulse shoppers of us all, even I considered how it would be funny to purchase a signature Love Island Water bottle with my own name on it. The thought of me among the courting rituals and mating calls of "the island" is hilariously absurd, yet these are real people on this show, people with degrees and lives and families like me. No, no, no they're not like me! They knew what they were getting into, they climbed into the arena, willingly, having just witnessed the last set of gladiators viciously torn to shreds by each other and by starved tigers, Caesar's and the crowd's thumbs pointed down.
they must choose insecure people on purpose, right? shallow body perfect people

A drain gallery installation, poetry is read out by sewer mutants and monsters.  

Small pieces written for the timeline section in Disegno Journal, written while on placement. Summer 2021

Serpentine pavilion Timeline What does "carbon negative" even mean? the technical consultant to this years serpentine pavilion, David Glover claims the construction was "carbon negative by 9,000 tonnes" - an impressive number, I think? Often the annual pavilion has been designed around sustainability and in light of Hans Ulrich Obrist's declaring "Ecology will be at the heart of everything we do" at the serpentine, it's fitting for the pavilion to aim for lowest carbon impact. it strikes me as a strange that the tag line of the project's environmental stance comes from a number calculated in post of its making. "carbon-negative" would suggest that the material being used in the construction of the pavilion, offsets the emissions from transportation and construction. Does this offset the pouring of a 85m³ of concrete foundation? I suppose so but isn't pouring new concrete foundations still something worth avoiding, especially if its going to be dug up and re-poured every year.

Blue Origin Timeline Earlier this year we saw Jeff Bezos announce he would step down as CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon, citing a need for more "time and energy" to focus on other ventures. One of these ventures being to launch himself and his mates 100km (62 miles) up into space. Blue Origin, the private aerospace manufacturer founded my Bezos is developing reusable spacecraft in order to "go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy". Of course, an essential part of the development of such technological advancements is for a $28mil charity auction bidder to hitch a 10 minute ride with a 57 year old man and his bro, doing a once around the old block in his shiny new multistage whip. Bezos can see there's nothing much left for him on earth and he might have seen the petition on change.org; "Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth". Maybe he could consider not coming back down?

Jesse de Wahls Timeline "I can not accept people's unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such." So said textile artist Jesse de Wahls in 2019, writing in what has since been widely seen as an anti-trans rights blog post. After the post attracted renewed online criticism earlier this year, London’s Royal Academy (RA) responded by posting an Instagram story announcing that it was pulling de Wahls’ textiles from its gift shop, before performing a U-turn and apologising, citing “the protection for free speech”. The RA’s botched response sadly distracted from the debate surrounding Wahls' misguided views, enabling her to go on national radio to quip, “I don't want to go down the route so many ‘woke warriors’ are going, that an apology is not enough, this is a big deal.” Perhaps the RA could have handled its initial response less performatively – did it need its own Instagram post? – but by then rowing back on this they've inadvertently justified Wahls rhetoric without necessarily agreeing with her.

Year 2 Viva Voce. This is the assorted proccess documentation used along side my Viva Voce presentation, the summative assessment for year 2, Design BA at Goldsmiths UOL.
VIVA VOCE

Contribute the the stream and copy out the whole of Shakespeares Complete Works. Progress and Scores. Stream.

A live brief for public architecture studio: We Made That. We are exploring the childs perspective in the 15min city and the ways play can be encouraged and made inclusive in urban spaces.

Mayor of London guide on making london more child friendly but written as though by children.

Struggling to collaborate over Zoom? So are we! look at some of our experiments with filming from different houses.

*film cut due to embassesment*