[Chapter 1: Parameters of the Digital]
[Chapter 2: Eruptions into the Physical]
[Chapter 3: Speculative Horizons]
[Conclusion]
[Bibliography & Artist Biographies]
This paper was developed as part of my M.A. in Material and Visual Culture (Anthropology) at UCL (2023-2024). It has been edited for publication on Making Material for accessibility to a wider audience. Fieldwork was conducted between April and June 2024 in London (UK), and research was completed in August 2024.
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∞
Artist Biographies
Amba Sayal-Bennett is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the migration of modernist forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience.
Duncan Carter is a designer, maker, and creative technologist based in London. He develops objects that embody technologies and natural physical phenomena in fixed forms. His work has a focus on the intersection of algorithmic design and contemporary craft, where nuanced shaping of digital processes can multiply the skill and efforts of the hand. Seeking to navigate the fraught relationship between science, technology, and utility, he uses cutting edge techniques to create works that reflect upon the underlying mechanics of both human and natural worlds. Much as how figurative arts explore nature’s image, Carter explores nature’s functionality as a medium.
enorê is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist based in London working with 3D-printed ceramics, textile, and video. They work with digital technology to think through the entanglements between virtuality, physical embodiment, and temporality. They use clay as a catalyst to question how digital objects can be mediated through physical processes, thinking about the fluidity of digital media into physicality and back, the modes of translation that arise from this kind of dynamics, and how this relates to how the body processes information. Using 3D scans and digital data to establish links between physical and digital realms, they bring into physical existence elements which can normally only be mediated through digital technology.
Kumbirai Makumbe is a Zimbabwean new media artist based in London. Using sculpture, audio-visual digital installation, image, and video, they continually interrogate the multi-dimensionality of blackness, queerness, transcendence and ‘inbetweenness’. Through world building and the use of speculative science fiction narratives, they place significant efforts into exploring alternative modes of being and thinking that could negate ideologies inhibiting a ‘needed’ future. Makumbe repeatedly brings elements from the digital worlds they have forged into IRL spaces, through 3D printing, as a crucial practice akin to terraforming. They are enticed by the materiality and malleability of digital matter and the infinite possibilities of its employability.
MARIA (Maria Joranko) is a London-based Latin-American writer, performer, and artist who makes sculptural installations, performances, video, and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of chronic illness, race, and notions of community. She combines natural and digital materials to engineer environments that create radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks. Currently, she is exploring pain (body, emotional, communal, spiritual) as a grounding for transformation and transmutation of the bodymind into an equitable and liberated future.
Natasha Eves is a textile artist and publican. Currently, she runs a traditional community-oriented pub in South-East London and teaches constructed textiles to undergraduates and postgraduates at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice-based research explores precarious relations, faltered communications, mental health, care, digital hoarding, and loss.
Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London. Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance, and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age. She creates objects, texts and installations that challenge the dominant historical narrative of the clash between Indigenous and European cultures. Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing drastically between the past and an alternate future. Online museum archives become an excavation ground for the collection of data, that she later recontextualizes, reassembles and re-presents. With a focus on new materialities, processes of production and collaboration between artist and machine, her work seeks to question ideas and practices of representation, appropriation, and authorship.
Sam Carvosso is an artist working across sculpture, drawing, video, and installation with a research-led focus. Informed by trips to National Parks, nature reserves and forests, his practice considers the creation and perception of landscape, with a particular interest in wild spaces. He runs Ossomas Studio, which provides 3D modelling, printing, and rendering services for artists and designers.
Sian Fan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines movement, the female body and technology to explore embodiment, spirituality, and human experience in the digital age. Drawing on her background in contemporary and aerial dance she suspends, fragments, and augments the body via choreography and digital techniques. She works across mediums, combining the physical and the virtual through sculpture, performance, animation, moving image and virtual & augmented reality.
Troika is a collaborative contemporary art group formed by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel in 2003. Working across media in sculpture, film, installation, and painting, their work contemplates humanity’s experiences and attitudes towards new technologies and how these transform our understanding and relationships to nature, each other, and the wider world. Their artworks broach themes that include artificial intelligence, algorithmic data, forms of life, virtual and physical representation systems. Their practice is often based in research and explores systems of knowledge in the fields of natural philosophy and the history of technology.