The Kinetic Phone Box stands at the top of One For The Road, the most impressive art bar in London.

It is a careful replica of a K-6 red telephone box like the ones you may see dispersed around London.

The only difference is that the Kinetic Phone Box isn’t designed to make calls, it is designed for another way to communicate and showcase.

It acts as a magnet for street art and street artists around it, building a collection of interventions and keeping its natural cycle of getting painted, weathering and getting the paint removed after some time.

Nonetheless, the removal of art from the panels is a very different process when it comes to the Kinetic Box.

All 4 sides detach and can be replaced with clean new panels, and instead of destroying the art that was on it; the panels can be placed on other versions of the Kinetic Box or showcased at events or art spaces.

Even though the panels lose the magnetic component to attract art around them when they leave the original spot, and they might not originally belong in the new spot, they have now become a vehicle for Urban and Street Art. Creating links across these different Kinetic boxes and panels no matter where they are placed.

It is a buffer zone, between what’s real street art and commissioned art, maintaining values but challenging the process and aftermath of the art.

The generated stuffed toy is a participatory workshop and a service that creates a form of creative therapy and can be used as a tool for building communication including verbal and physical. I invited people to contribute their memories stories and secrets as recorded audio but also left it open to them to send in any emotional content that would lead to them creating their own soft toy. The process of recording, waiting for generation and handmaking is weaved into the outcome, which is the toy, then developing a new interpretation and story with it.

I used the programme Processing to code an algorithm that can transform audio files to 2d images which is used as patterns to make soft toys. According to the image, the toy is hand-stitched which can later be a stuffed toy, a wearable toy, a brooch and even on clothes.

Whether music, private secret or public memory, the generated stuffed toy can express information of the audio files’ content and embody intangible things like feelings, emotions and memories. From the aspect of its interactivity and the process it is designed and crafted, the generated stuffed toy can be more than a toy.

After people received the generated stuffed toy, they had different interactions and have built an intimate relationship with their toys. The generated stuffed toy is designed to provide a service that can embody people’s memory secret and story and make it interactive.

Catrin’s third-year project focuses on the sartorial narratives that are held within our clothing, breaking apart the social constructs bound together in both material and theoretical contexts. She researched the topic of material narratives through item deconstruction, both physically and theoretically, old clothes either handed down to her, collected or sourced from her own wardrobe, in order to determine how she could form ‘deadstock’ fabrics and textiles into new articles of clothing, whilst maintaining the origins and stories that were already woven into them by their previous owners.

Each item made has been designed to be explicitly patchworked and quilted, to exhibit the reconstructed, multi-narrative outcome. Through using ID cards tailored to each material component, she hopes that these can work figuratively as care labels, providing transparent insight as to where the fabrics the clothes are made of have come from, hoping to restore trust and sustainable manufacture between the maker and consumer.

She has made these clothes to serve as visual story tellers of the pieces that came before. She hopes that by unpicking and exploring further the material cultures of the items that we surround ourselves with every day she can encourage a slower and more considered approach to an industry polluted with demand, access and consumption, instead, manifesting sustainable behaviours. Through her chosen mediums of film and a digitalised zine she hopes that you may feel reconnected and mindful towards your clothing and the places it has been and the places it will go.

My project focuses on well-being, due to the situation of covid-19 mental health has worsened within the past year according to many sources. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is my focused topic. I feel that it is important to develop new ways and strategies on how to support individuals who go through stress and anxiety during today's society.

As a designer who is passionate about creating ways on how I support this, I thought of developing a device that imitates the sounds of rain. Initially this object is for individuals who find comfort in rain.

Imagine being hugged by the rain? Controlling the rain? Interacting with the rain? You think rain is just something that pours regularly, but really it stimulates creativity. Some of us find comfort in rain. When it hits against the windows, crickles and crackles lightly. That relaxes our minds.

‘A hug from the rain.’ This relates to how during lockdown some of us can’t have human interaction or hugging. The feelings that the box would give when using it could create the same effect. A box that emulates the sound of the rain as we touch and interact with it. When you lie down and hold the box with your hands and touch it, it’ll create these sounds. simply use the remote to operate the LED light choosing your own comforting colour since blue isn't just associated with calmness. Now watch how the pattern reflects across the whole room (in the dark preferably).

I hope my design creates peace and comfort.

An overlapping of Eastern and Western tradition and narrative…

A home may be viewed as a vessel for narrative, meaning it represents the virtues, traditions, and rituals of anyone who occupies it.

Since March 2020, our homes have been tested like never before. Lockdown has confined our routines, rituals, and habits within four walls. The boundaries of our sacred space, which once held together with the components of our unique home-life, have become blurred as we have internalised the outside, causing our homes and furnishings to take on new multifunctional design meanings.

While thinking about the constraints we faced in the home over lockdown, my mind went straight to memories of visiting Iran with my sister and father. I reminisced the rugs in my grandmothers home - visualising my family and I all sat crosslegged on the carpets, enjoying dinner, or having a conversation.

Rugs in Iran are used as dividers for dedicated rituals, creating a line that may otherwise be blurred. The rug was designed to shape-shift into a multitude of uses dependent on context. When we eat, it becomes a table, to study, it becomes a desk, to sleep, it becomes a bed. The rug created boundaries in the home.

The Persian rug is my vessel for conveying our new life indoors. Through the creation of simple structure and forms, the rug will have the means to express its personality and versatility; demonstrating to Western culture that this woven textile, used for decor and aesthetic is so much more; it is richly manifold, capable of depicting our new narratives in the home during lockdown, while also bringing to light the limited roles we - in Western culture - place onto our specific furniture items.

Cannabis legalisation has been a growing area of discussion in the UK. News reports on the subject are becoming more frequent and many people are forming stronger opinions on the type of role cannabis should play in the future of the nation.

Joint Together: Lewisham, is an educational board game that explores the many complex issues of cannabis culture in the UK. The game delves into the socio-cultural, political, medical, criminal, and economic issues which surround the topic. Six relatable characters will take you on a journey that will challenge any views you might already hold. Each of the characters will experience different consequences in each destination depending on who they are and how they are connected with cannabis. All characters have been based on real people and their real-life experiences. A deck of question cards will test your current depth of knowledge and provide you with an opportunity to gain extra tokens on the way.

Join Together: Lewisham, is intended to be used as a fun educational tool in a workshop setting. The game can be used as a dynamic educational experience for high school and college students, youth groups, social workers, medical and care staff, retirement communities, teachers, politicians, plus others.

The images show the prototype of the game before it is created into a bespoke hand finished item. The game will be created with laser-cut plywood, and 3D printed objects, hand-finished with acrylic paints.

Dear grandfather,

As you may know, a digital civilisation is a civilisation of records. You can't hide anything and it doesn't disappear. Every day, we gain a wealth of information through digital platforms, while simultaneously leaving traces of our minds on digital platforms.

Here I have a question. How should we embrace a big data revolution that will change our memory storage process?

I think my grandfather, you are my answer. Could you remember the moment when I called you and asked ‘could you recommend some food for lunch?’

Your answer was red bean soup. It came to me as serendipity. You figured out that I was missing my hometown in London. Your logic was that since you couldn't physically come to me and comfort me, you wanted to recommend a food that would be worth it. Because you were a soldier who participated in the Korean War, he may have wanted me to feel his experience that psychological stability come when the body is warm. Here, I understand your world through your indirect experience while he also understands me in reverse. Like this, when we discover serendipitous moment, we share our views of the world. It allows us to make better decisions since it enables us to live face to face with people who have different lifestyles and different needs.

Based on this, I made this little device based on the above. This device I've created here offers users a new way to experience data. It provides users with knowledge and subjectivity that go beyond the universal experience. And also provides an eerie experience that lets you guess the unknown. Furthermore, it satirically shows how humans are evolving into 'Phono Sapiens'.

The operating principle of this device is simple. You can ask my grandfather anything. This grandpa device with a sound sensor can listen to your questions all the way through and will answer your questions. Anytime you have any questions or need serendipity or wisdom you can ask my grandfather. However, no one knows what my grandfather will say to your question.

If we can find serendipity from the data, we can recover our unique 'humanity' along with technology. And this recovery of humanity will help us to free from the bondage of being overwhelmed by our own technology.

Of all these observations, the most interesting object is, by far, ourselves. Humans. Because it is the subject and object of observation at the same time. Therefore, data that depends on observation and recording must exist as a part in any case. This is because, due to the essential functional limitations of the observation and recording process, humans' subjective viewpoints and choices are inevitably involved in the data collection process. Therefore, data is never an objective entity. Therefore, the point of my work is the recognition that the source of data is the ‘observer’s mind’.

The first step in properly interacting with data begins with securing subjectivity in data interpretation with the view that data is a subjective observation of objects, phenomena, or events. And here we can find true serendipity and imagination.

Hope someone who can read this letter can find your serendipity by meeting my grandfather.

With love.

Moon

The skin the pressure of another human touch. Who was the last person you

felt? To be pacific think about that hug.

Who was it shared with? Someone you havenʼt seen in months or simply a

person you live with. For me it was saying goodbye to my mother…donʼt worry

she is not dead weʼve just been apart.

Like most of the world has been this last year... Apart

So, in short my project focus on the moment of coming together.

I began by looking at the effects that the lack of human touch has on our

physical and mental welling while we all entered this world of isolation. This

helped me understand the vital role touch has in forming connections and

relationships for humans to truly thrive.

My aim was to originally look at how design could be used to aid and replicate

the touch of a loved one when denied access to them. As my project developed

it became clear it was more about celebrating and capturing this moment of

coming together over our period of separation due to Covid-19.

The Hug is widely associated with the pandemic. It represents m/ny things but

wh/t st/nds out the most is seeing it /s / symbol of hope.

The interlocking jumpers th/t do this by cerebr/te the first hug. C/pturing/

replic/ting the first moment I w/s /ble to hold my loved ones. Individu/lly

representing e/ch rel/tionship.

These jumpers /llow you to feel the w/rmth of your loved one, but /lso the

loneliness when /p/rt. When the connected g/rments become disconnected,

without the hug, you /re left with just the open sp/ces for where the missing

person once wr/pped their /rms /round you.

Visual information bombards our world, creating the need for unnecessary commodities in exchange for short-term gratification, social status and identity. Today, our online world is flooded by advertisements due to a circumstantial swap; our private data unwittingly exchanged for personalised adverts.

These methods of surveillance raise ethical questions about our privacy rights. Previous scandals regarding our online data being used without consent, such as ‘Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’, illustrate how little we can trust such large corporations. Advertising however, is not only becoming more intrusive, but is also developing new methods of surveillance through advancements in technology. An example of this being billboards becoming installed with facial recognition in order to deliver customisable adverts which are relevant to the person in front of it… I ask, how can we protect ourselves before this future becomes a normality?

‘000DETECTED’ focuses on creating forms that obscure our identity from such new technology such as facial recognition in the advertising world, especially as today an average Londoner is captured on CCTV up to 300 times per day. Inspired by CV Dazzle face paint, I have developed patterns that prevent being detected by facial recognition into wearable forms of anti-tech jewellery, allowing the wearer to become undetectable in public spaces where surveillance is placed.

Below your feet, under the ground surface runs a connecting white mass of infinitely renewable interwoven threads of hyphae forming the vegetative portion of fungi called Mycelium. Attaching itself to root systems, creating a symbiotic relationship that is the groundwork of a working ecosystem, bringing sustenance to all living species and is the literal world wide web.

Looking to the beginning of the design process, materials. Taking into consideration the full product life cycle and the chain effect that one unsustainable move makes.

My aim is to develop sustainable materials that have responsible upstream and downstream disposal methods and practices using agricultural byproducts.

Oyster Mushroom Substrate the no longer commercially viable growing blocks was used to develop a Oyster mushroom mycelium, wheat composite, that has the potential to be used as plant pots, cremation vessels and furniture with further development.

The project seeks to engage a wider community encouraging people to make their own materials and products, seeing the resources that go into production, whilst collectively improving and developing the mycelium, wheat composite through open sourcing.

Dear Professor

This is an overview of the research that I’ve been doing over the last year.

Please use it to develop your understanding of waste.

Regards, 


Regards, 
Elinor Wegener

Dear Nana Bradley,

Throughout the last year I have been getting to know your life through the eyes of those that knew you best: my mum, and your best friend, my Nana Boon. Before now I’d never fully appreciated the role my Nana Boon took on after your life changing operation, and the lengths that she went to in nursing you and caring for my mum. The relationship that you formed, blurring the gaps between neighbour, friend, colleague and eventually carer have led me to wonder; how the outside conditions of living in a small industrial textile town, like Congleton, could have influenced the dynamics that your relationship took on. In diving so deeply into your cultural heritage, I have unearthed a wealth of information that has given me a vast insight into the industrial textile community which, through both circumstance and talent, you found yourself belonging to.

Our story is shared in a short documentary following my mum’s move back to Congleton after spending the last 30 years bringing me and my sisters up outside of town. I knew she’d always felt most at home here, and naturally yearned to live in the town that you made her home. Now the lasting legacy of both your and my surrogate Nana Boon’s friendship, has led an insight into the reimagining of community togetherness in Congleton itself, but also in other post-industrial communities. Voiced by myself, my mum and Nana Boon, the documentary titled ‘Mrs Mum’ aims to offer an insight into the conditions present, that led up to the care and compassion provided by your dearest friend, my Nana Boon.

All my love,

Lydia

Message to humanity

Digital technology seemed like a catalyst for human civilization's development until it became not only a powerful tool but an inevitable lifestyle. It is no exaggeration to say that now you 'coexist' in the digital world. However, one of humanity's greatest creations, the digital world is not designed to be friendly enough for humans. There have always been some errors. I am not talking about the errors about code, computer virus or updates but fundamental and infrastructural errors which come when the digital world is delivered to the analog world. I let you face a part of the possible future caused by one of the errors.

After a long period of confrontation between the human body and digital world, the traditional human body and digital world resulted with genetic evolution setting their priority to the digital world over the analog world. The evolved human bodies optimised their skeletal and muscular structure for the digital world. It even redesigned themselves to embrace back and neck pain. Neck went forward and back and got hunched. It was, in a perspective, the defeat of the natural human body by the digital world and degeneration.

What you will see is one of the formal fashions from the future.

I see many of you in your time swimming with the tide of the digital world instead of rebelling against it…and I want to ask you,

Is this how you want your both worlds to become?

Is this your ideal world?

-The creator of ‘Homo Sapiens Digital’, Harry Jinwook Seong.

I make music as retropxssy.

I design in the retroverse - a multi-disciplinary practice exploring music, philosophy, object-making and the potential Design has to change the world.

I started this project as a musician and maker in a crisis. I had an album to release. But making and my creative community, so essential to my practice and life seemed under threat.

How would I normally release an album - a ‘listening party’? Impossible now on many levels.

The Anti - Listening Party Capsule Kit’ redesigns the ‘listening party’ intervening in dominant capitalist narratives around creative work i.e. that precariousness and exhaustion are the trade-off for fulfilling work. These narratives are rooted in neo-colonial attitudes and effects.

Live music events are sites of resistance.

The mosh pit rips the world open and writes its own story.

Unable to take place under COVID restrictions, the ALPCK creates conditions to evoke this power. The objects offer a space to meet, to dance, to resist.

Making is too important to be erased. The communities around making are too important to be erased.To be a maker doesn’t have to ensue exhaustion, individualism, a corporatised climb, endlessly ‘upward’.

The Anti Listening Party Capsule Kit is an invitation.Through play, shared experience, conversation and crucially, music - the kit attempts to, in the words of Kodwo Eshun: intervene in the ‘corporate futures industry’. It asks what the future can be? It asks, where do you want to go? What do you want to hear?

Disembodiment begins the second you attempt to define a fashion model. The term “model” has its own varied set of meanings, most of which refer to objects or concepts designed to facilitate a labour process - an architect working on scaled mock-ups for example. In the case of fashion modelling, these tools for production are humans. But when it comes to performing their labour, rather than being solely based on completing tasks or utilising skills, the model’s appearance is the most important aspect of their work.

It’s this focus on the model’s image that complicates the relationship between the labour and remuneration - there are different kinds of modelling that physically require different movements, gestures and choreographies, as well as different aesthetic tastes dependent on a brand’s DNA. It becomes even more confusing when you investigate the legal/contractual aspects, such as intellectual property, physical treatment of the model’s body, the signing of contracts which dissipate autonomy, and how the eventual usage (in terms of both the model’s degree of visibility and the physical places the advertising is to be used) determines how the model will be compensated. The word “unrecognisable” is used to describe a format in which not all of the model is depicted in the final image to obscure their identity - this is typically done by cropping an image just below the eyes or the entire head. In most instances, a model is paid less when advertising is produced in this manner.

For the viewer (especially those who are unfamiliar with the modelling/fashion industry) “Unrecognisable Labour” conceptually explains how models perform their jobs by pairing typical repetitive modelling movements with appearances - demonstrated by 3D models of me, modelling. It also proposes another form of likeness that models could employ to carry out more/other forms of labour - particularly in their social media spaces which in itself is a tool for models to increase their visibility within the industry.

My Friend,

Oh, it’s been so long. Ever since returning to my local city, Macau, the chances of my return have been slim. Whether we would meet again has now become a question hanging in the air, slowly drifting by…… sometimes getting closer, and yet always impossibly far.

Meanwhile, the twenty-one days of quarantine in a hotel room has pushed me on boundaries both new and old at the same time. What started as an attempt to make a variety of prints in my student accommodation room has now zoned in on the consumption habits within Macau. It is safe to say my investigation in printmaking has found a direction amidst the empty chaos.

Taking advantage in the absence of gathering limits, I am now picking up pace in preparation for a collaborative workshop with a local educational organisation promoting UNESCO values. I like to call it the Gutenberg Soap Series, aiming to have Macau local attendees rethink their engagement with their everyday objects and side with luxurious consumption through the act of making prints.

Most of the materials utilised in this workshop involves either recycled, decomposable materials or brings discussion points on terms of consumption in everyday habits. The paper is recycled from already printed office paper, a tribute to locals with their day to day office jobs. The soap I gathered from Macanese locals who enjoy “staycation”, the act of staying in a hotel for entertainment, something I believe only Macau, with its abnormally large hotel to people ratio can accommodate. This soap was taken most likely with consumer thoughts of “not letting the money go to waste”, yet amusingly, it remains unused in storage afterwards.

Carving text with this soap represents this consumption habit within Macau – of spending money to stay at a hotel. It also reflects a limitation in the surroundings, because this soap is a temporary tool. Stamping once with the tool would render it just the same as acquiring specific tools to make this one stamp, stamping twice and the soap is now flexible, but users will understand there is a time limit. Printing with it too much will soon dissipate the soap, akin to our relationship in day-to-day consumption.

What is the materiality of these household objects that took part in stamping a foreground? A discussion can be found per person per object, tracing back the object to its origins and environment. How many of these are produced per year? How much more can we consume before the resources to make these objects fade out, like the soap? How much of the resources we intake are renewable and sustainable?

Alas this event has yet to happen, though my guess is by the time this letter reaches you it would be well on its way. Amidst all the constant preparation, my thoughts go out to you, wondering in all curiosity on your end of the journey. We may be miles away in distance, though our pathways are one and the same.

With regards,
Oriana


My Friend,

Oh, it’s been so long. Ever since returning to my local city, Macau, the chances of my return have been slim. Whether we would meet again has now become a question hanging in the air, slowly drifting by…… sometimes getting closer, and yet always impossibly far.

Meanwhile, the twenty-one days of quarantine in a hotel room has pushed me on boundaries both new and old at the same time. What started as an attempt to make a variety of prints in my student accommodation room has now zoned in on the consumption habits within Macau. It is safe to say my investigation in printmaking has found a direction amidst the empty chaos.

Taking advantage in the absence of gathering limits, I am now picking up pace in preparation for a collaborative workshop with a local educational organisation promoting UNESCO values. I like to call it the Gutenberg Soap Series, aiming to have Macau local attendees rethink their engagement with their everyday objects and side with luxurious consumption through the act of making prints.

Most of the materials utilised in this workshop involves either recycled, decomposable materials or brings discussion points on terms of consumption in everyday habits. The paper is recycled from already printed office paper, a tribute to locals with their day to day office jobs. The soap I gathered from Macanese locals who enjoy “staycation”, the act of staying in a hotel for entertainment, something I believe only Macau, with its abnormally large hotel to people ratio can accommodate. This soap was taken most likely with consumer thoughts of “not letting the money go to waste”, yet amusingly, it remains unused in storage afterwards.

Carving text with this soap represents this consumption habit within Macau – of spending money to stay at a hotel. It also reflects a limitation in the surroundings, because this soap is a temporary tool. Stamping once with the tool would render it just the same as acquiring specific tools to make this one stamp, stamping twice and the soap is now flexible, but users will understand there is a time limit. Printing with it too much will soon dissipate the soap, akin to our relationship in day-to-day consumption.

What is the materiality of these household objects that took part in stamping a foreground? A discussion can be found per person per object, tracing back the object to its origins and environment. How many of these are produced per year? How much more can we consume before the resources to make these objects fade out, like the soap? How much of the resources we intake are renewable and sustainable?

Alas this event has yet to happen, though my guess is by the time this letter reaches you it would be well on its way. Amidst all the constant preparation, my thoughts go out to you, wondering in all curiosity on your end of the journey. We may be miles away in distance, though our pathways are one and the same.

With regards,
Oriana

Through this project, we aim to use domestic objects as counter-metrics that remind people to rest and stop working, highlighting how free time is increasingly colonized by work as more people have been working from home during the pandemic and it becomes harder to separate work and home life.

To help achieve a better work-life balance we have designed a toolkit- Workless Worker, which comprises the incense, the record player, the vinyl, the 5 seats, and the manual.

The bench provides you with a space to work and take a break on at the same time. Allowing you to dictate the terms for your work and your break. The incense and the music aims to help you keep track of time subconsciously. The toolkit comes with a manual which provides a detailed account on how to efficiently use these products.

If I ask you to describe yourself right now, would you include your profession as a part of your identity? How much of yourself would you associate with work?

Work

Work

Work

Would you say your work makes you feel like a contributing member towards society? Or is it just a means for you to make money?

Money

Money

Money

Apart from daily expenses and tax, how do you spend your money? Would you say you spend your money with the same, less or more consideration than how you spend your free time? (Time outside of work)

Time

Time

Time

Time is extremely valuable, and a capitalist may even be bold enough to call time money. But would having money implement the same as having time?

A rich man on his deathbed can try to summon all of his wealth for an extra year, but time cannot be bought. The progress of time is such that everyone experiences it subjectively as well as objectively.

kanika.goel1999@gmail.com

simonishah005@gmail.com

Liminal or Liminal space is defined as a space that is on the ‘border’, a space that is somewhere in-between. A space at the boundary of two dominant spaces.

In redefining the subject of liminality I look to the works of Julia Kristeva, In “Powers of Horror” an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory. In her essay “Powers of Horror” Kristeva finds the abject an open wound, skin of the milk, mold, and sewers. Through them, we understand how abjection comes to be. In the development of my work, I use the examples of the abject to draw the narrative of my work. The different threads of meaning these examples give enables us to make suggestions of how we understand the spaces we inhabit. To start asking ourselves what could a space be other than a large-scale structure we simply walk into. But rather examine the scale of the space. How does this space present itself to you? what is your relation to the space? And what are the connotations surrounding this space?

Dear mother,

Living away from home, to communicate with you, I experienced a complete dependence on digital media, especially as an international student studying abroad. Many days, I spent hours on a video call to perceive you. Countless nights, I talked the night away on the phone to feel connected with you. Nevertheless, with more communication through the digital media, only isolation grew.

Every time I went back home to see you, the contrast between the physical presence and the limited form of distal sensory, sight and hearing, communication offered by the current digital media became more and more evident. The longing for loved ones could only be satisfied when I am able to feel the presence with my own body; through touching, smelling, and dining together. Upon reflection, I realised how proximal sensory modalities are critical in human communication.

Nonetheless, modern means of communication, such as emails and text messages, focus solely on information delivery. This modern way of connection neglects sensorial elements. Thus, hindering the cultivation of bonds. Then how may I reconnect to you?

Looking back into history, people shared personal objects to stay connected. In the Victorian era, sculptures were made with hair to honour loved ones. In the Middle Ages, people interpreted flowers to decipher the metaphoric meaning delivered from their lovers. Thinking of you, I also feel the scent of fresh-cut flowers that you bought at the flower market every Saturday.

As Baudrillard and many others regard, the proliferation of the hyper-real has consequences. Laptop, smartphone, and iPad is the reality we live in today. In every conceivable aspect, this hyperrealism has become the reality. Consequently, resulting in a reversed reality. I aim to escape this reversed reality - bringing back the physical world between us. Perhaps, a flower, as a living thing, will reconnect us through its liveliness.

Ikebana, the ancient method of flower arrangement, which has come down from grandmother to you and now to me, has been practised for centuries. This old practice stays at the core of our relationship. Surely, Ikebana possesses the spirit of 'expressing oneself through flowers' beyond the insensitive digital communication. Now the order of flower arrangement becomes choreography. Creating a personal language of a flower acts as a subtle non-verbal communication. Parallel Sensation through Ikebana becomes a ritual, retrieving back the bond once lost.

I, as a designer, will try to heal the disconnection of the digital age through the most analogue yet personal way.

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

With love, Rosie

This project is centred around people with Skin Picking Disorder (SPD) also known as dermatillomania, who pick at irregularities on their skin in an obsessive way that is compulsive and difficult to control. Skin Stories started with my own skin journey, nearly a decade of struggling with SPD, not knowing that the disorder had a name and that it was far more than just a bad habit. After a long phase of experimentation, researching the disorder, and interviewing the community I designed a set of cards entitled: The Skin Picker's Deck.

Focusing on the community aspect and connecting with fellow skin pickers, this deck took influence from the likes of tarot and affirmation cards, blending together the different characteristics to create a multipurpose tool for skin pickers. Formed in a unique way, every card is inspired by an interview with a member of the skin picking community, both online and offline, from different corners of the world. Each individual's story poured into creating the illustration and text that forms the cards!

The deck can be used as a Discussion Tool by using the visual prompt and question on the back to open up conversation on dermatillomania. As a Self-Help Tool, using it consistently and placing the cards in visible spots can help build up a more positive mindset. Finally, as a Reminder that despite dermatillomania seeming like very lonely experience, each card in this deck represents one of many people out there going through the same struggle.

Frontal (Alpha) Asymmetry Transaction Machine

Does it seem like more and more, the tech closest to you feels like it can read your mind? Thats because it does.

Tracking your behaviours online can provide detailed accounts of you as a person. AI processing techniques have rocket-boosted the second party’s ability to know you through your actions online. Who and what you love or hate, and how you feel.

This is a highly valuble asset, the foundation of a social media empire is the profiling and tracking of consumer data. Looking forwards, the progression of the devices closest to us will inch closer and closer to the marketing goldmine of complete predictability.

The unpredictable homosapien is ancient history.

...

As an opportunity to sell your data, the FATM uses EEG (Electroencephalography) to collect and process your specific response to a set bank of stimulus, aimed to harvest a sensitive data set.

FATM uses real-life marketing methods of brain scanning technology (EEG) to process and record a subject’s emotional and implicit responses to visual stimuli. Using the ‘Frontal Alpha Asymmetry’ technique, an impression of the subject’s positive and negative responses provides a map to predict future responses to various concepts, objects and aesthetics.

The results of the test provide a rudimental look at the subject’s ‘approach and avoid’ psychological motivators. Sensitive inferences can now be made by displaying political or controversial images as queries. In exchange, the subject is compensated with Ethereum cryptocurrency.

Approach and avoidance data provides a goldmine in terms of neuroscientific marketing. To hold an accurate profile of one’s approach motivators is to understand and predict emotional and individual-specific responses to any stimulus.

The trade-off for such access remains highly sensitive. The ability to identify and process such highly detailed biometrics holds potential to expose parts of us we do not consent to or even realised are being recorded, processed and profiled.

My project, “The Quarantine Life”, was driven by the current covid-19 pandemic where I was able to travel back and forth in the UK and Hong Kong for further research. In the beginning of the pandemic, I returned to Hong Kong and adapted to different protective methods from my parents. For example, using hand gels, wearing surgical masks and sanitizing spray everything that enters my home so to ensure the environment is virus-free. During the time in the UK, I have continued with my usual habits from Hong Kong and was viewed as “obsession” since I stockpiled different home cleaning products as well as alcohol sanitizer. This has driven me to explore the concept of “culture difference”, specifically the attitude towards the pandemic between the west and east.

This film was created based on footage that I videotaped during the 14 days in Penny’s Bay Quarantine Camp. Unlike hotels where you are able to feel connected to the rest of the world through street views, this campsite is located in Lantau Island surrounded by hills. Wifi is not equipped and people are not allowed to leave their rooms without permission. The staff wearing protective gear were the only view that I had during that 14 days.They have worked as a clock to me as that is their specific working pattern.

We are ‘submissive, docile, compliant, accommodating, sweet in the kitchen, tiger in the bedroom’ kind of women (Jessie Tu, 2018)

We are exoticized.

Our identities otherised and depersonalized

but we have our own autonomy.

These narratives are woven together through the assumptions, perceptions, and representations of Asian Women.

Drawing upon tart cards, which are objects of glaring intersections of race, gender, colonialism and sexual discrimination.

Through deconstructing and reconstructing our conversations and what’s unsaid we have the possibility to interrupt and redesign our narratives.

We can begin by unsaying what has been said.

Through engaging in workshops, drawing out stories, starting conversations and observing images that reveal the way stereotyping and racism has become normalized behaviour, both in the visual culture we see but also during everyday public encounters.

We can begin by unsaying what has been said through:

Creating collages, cutting, sticking, making, remaking, hiding, revealing, deconstructing, reconstructing, rewriting, reframing, unpacking, reversing and flipping.

We as Asian women can redesign our self-description and regenerate ourselves personally and collectively.

We decide,

Whether we are exotic

We are not purchasable

We are not shy or submissive

We are more than just our stereotype

We can choose to take responsibility and actively participate in the creation of our image.

This project is aimed to raise people‘s attention to the importance of children psychology and easily overlooked behavior which causes unhappy childhood. The users are especially Chinese parents who are from the old generation and not well educated. Most of them still follow the old-fashioned education method, for example, study changes people’s lives and scolding children is good for them. These kinds of behaviour may start with a good point but end up with bad affects such as children may feel unloved when parents push them too hard to study well. A lot of Chinese students have complained that they feel their parents only care about their grades but not them, however, when I speak to parents, most of them are just thinking study better could let their kids have a better future. And this is why they are so strict with them. Here I started my research with two news I saw about students with good study results suicide and commit crime, you can play this interactive game based on stories and scenes to find out why and what happens on traditional Chinese parenting and a Chinese student’s school life.

My multi-disciplinary practice looks to craft new understandings of material networks, framing the earth's surface as a visual record. I have produced a series of wearable pieces made from appropriated geological matter collected from a specific spoil heap - the waste left from coal extraction. Through extraction we transform and deplete. The objects I have made become a sensuous expression that asks, rhetorically, how might we change the value systems around materials we so readily exploit?

A narrated film takes a view from the micro to the macro where the deep time processes that formed this material sing a new song. The spoil heap is the last stop on this journey and from this final expression of coal, its forgotten yet vibrant waste, I hope to form new understandings through the act of wearing and feeling.

The additional publication, ’Reaping the Spoil’, catalogues the material traces at the site. It acts as a manual for the wearer, a conceptual map that takes you through a story of abandoned coke ovens to a medicinal plant called herb bennet. In this way the user becomes a cultural extractor with material traces being a gateway into a broader expression of coal and its interconnections. With these sensory tools I hope to create new attunements and harmonies that delve gently into the question of what it means to ‘leave our mark’.

Hi, this is me again. Sorry to crawl back into your mind as you thought I left you for good —I just really like you. I think it’s nice that you tried to do something with me/for me, maybe we’ll be friends one day. For now, I understand that I just keep messing with your ambitions and stopping you from finishing anything, which you don’t enjoy that much apparently. I’d like to be sorry for all the projects you lost in me, but I’m not. It’s just who I am, it’s just what I do: I’m a brain breaker and I distort time. I hope you understand.

Yours truly,

Anxiety.

Hey, well no, I don’t understand, don’t come to me saying we could be friends but not apologising and falsely justifying your unwelcome presence in my mind. I’m mad at you but you know what, fine, you are who you are. Allow me to just dislike you a very large amount. Anyway, you’d be happy to know that all my lost projects are now together in a box, forming a great collection of thoughts that I’ll keep working on, and a beautiful project on their own. And that was the ultimate purpose: to make you tangible and show what you do. See, I will always trick you into never completely controlling me.

F*** you Anxiety!

Clara.

Collection is composed of:

Lady Moon — short novel

The Story of Procrastination — postcards

Dear [ ] (and its use) — self-help book

This project is the reducing overdose bread campaign using the speculated design in which is the world is dominated by bread.

Through the past, many years of technology development human beings are living a comfortable life. And unfortunately, people are losing their ideal life in order to maintain their technological convenience. Likewise, bread was a significant food resource and the perfect design for human beings to save in nature. however, after industrialization, the role of bread has been changed. As much as the bread is been easy to get, people are tending to over-consume the bread. Therefore, many people are currently suffering from diseases due to the chemical reaction between the human organ system and gluten. however, people are still having bread-like before, therefore in order to save from this nutrition, tragedy people need to aware the true fact about reality.

Accordingly, this campaign is willing to help people for reducing the amount of their consumption, by using the uncanny valley theory which is making people visually uncomfortable feeling. therefore, people will have an awakening that the bread is not helping us anymore and make them stay in a safe environment without the bread.

This year, I have journeyed deep into exploring my own habitual development, especially in regards to choices around my health. Eating well and exercising have not always been important to me and I have struggled personally, being both overweight and later underweight throughout my adolescence. This took a massive toll on my self esteem and only through circumstance, learning and trial and error, was I able to make a sustainable change.

Now, I attend the gym multiple times each week, eat very healthily and have a good relationship with food in moderation.

It has become my task to find ways to help other young people who struggle with the same problems, in a world saturated with unhealthy foods, false information and unrealistic expectations, perpetuated by the twisting and turning of social media.

I have researched into areas of social psychology and philosophy, including the works of Foucault and Shusterman, modern neurological science, nudging and looking at a wide range of analytical data through trials and experiments. Many of these fields, we have only really scratched the surface, there is still so much we do not understand about our habits and findings are appearing perpetually.

Upon comparing the niche and often exploitative markets of health and wellbeing products, I realised that young people needed a cheaper and accessible way to improve their own health.

I wanted to create an environment or space, where kids can learn and take a sense of pride in taking steps, however small, to improve their own wellbeing.

So I decided to use narrative and storytelling to develop a character within an interface. By picking up animation skills, I have developed a demo application. This works on a question and answer basis, reminding children (8-14), to be mindful of the opportunities to add plant based foods to each meal and the benefits. This relationship creates a support structure and a space where the discussion can be opened up for young people, when it is often so difficult and or avoided.

After many drafts, discussing with a GP and using instagram demo testing, I have arrived at an iteration of my design that has emotional responses to answers, using body language and facial features as its source of expression. The lips are also synced with the audio, with subtitles to cater for children who may have different learning difficulties.

Within the application concept, are links to support sources to the NHS, to make sure that if kids are really struggling, they are aware that help is always there.

I have learnt so much in this process and have found an avenue which combines several of my passions. In the future, I intend to improve and iterate on this piece, and show it to companies within the industry.

Jack is a London based designer, who specialises in digital mediums including graphics design, animation as well as textiles. His work aims to address the societal issues that threaten our health and wellbeing, providing alternative means to challenge harmful habitual behaviours in the pursuit of improved vitality.

“Someone proposed searching by regression: To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity....” — Jorge Luis Borge, 'The Library of Babel' (1941)

Archives have always been concerned with memory and the present. Although archival records are evidence of past occurrences, they remain a living instrument of today's society. As a witness to human thoughts and actions, and a compendium of the underpinnings of societal rules and mores, they provide reference points for our daily lives and enrich our collective memory.

Technological advances have challenged traditional archival practices and provide opportunities for improved archival access. For example, ever since volunteering as a digitisation assistant at the Royal Academy of Arts on their RA250 project, I have developed a fascination for archival collections and documentation.

With the current proliferation of information and knowledge expansion, individuals and communities often require tools to find ways to trace their existence and anthropological impacts? To explore this, I began to create clips of famous speeches and linking archival images to keywords (Fig 1). In doing so, I captured previously untold histories that can be celebrated, questioned, and subvert existing research methodologies.

I was primarily motivated by the desire to discover an alternative visual meaning and language - an outlet for engaging with potentially positive, complex and empowering conversations about personal and collective identities. I have designed an alternative tool to search image archives and visualise said search results (Fig 2).

By bridging visual and auditory experiences with digitised collections, engage with and begin a dialogue with the public. If archives are to play a more significant social role and explore future socio-technological applications ranging from ‘natural language processing’ to idea generation.

When coming into year 3 I wanted to reflex on my past projects. Through this observation, I noticed a pattern of the vast about of women who struggle with self-love and self-acceptance and body positivity. Once I saw this pattern, I started to research current events that are affecting the female community today, such as the NOT ALL MEN movement, The Women’s March and the current situation in Poland with women’s rights. I also read many articles that discussed why so many women struggle with confidence and how all these factors could be caused by society, cultural beauty standards and stereotypes. Once I had more understanding I created a concept of a female empowerment group with fictional, fairy tale and magical themes. Because through my dissertation I learnt the importance of fairy tales in adulthood and the strong moral lessons they teach us. And how creative writing, drawing, narrative medicine and poetic language can have a huge positive impact on one’s mental health. In the sessions, I wanted to deal with real issues that young women deal with such as depression, poor self-image, self-neglect, lacking self-love and unstable relationships. But I wanted to take a different approach to how I discussed this and take a back seat from the sometimes glumness of reality. In workshops, I asked the group to creatively respond to situations with fictional creatures but in reality, the characters have similar issues that women struggle with. I asked them to use creative writing and drawing to respond to situations hoping that the message subconsciously passes onto them and they could use this message for themselves when they come across similar situations later on. Each session featured a fairy tale written about real women and their journeys throughout life and I transformed them into fairy tales, so their messages of hope strength and recovery could be passed on. The stories are about bipolar, recovering from child abuse, recovering from alcoholism and sexuality. From this is created a book and featured some of the drawings from the women themselves. In the workshop we also created characters and our kingdom, I wanted to transform the participants into their characters through SFX makeup and develop our narrative. Also, I wanted to create an intermate setting and a memory that would last forever. I have created a new community from the workshops and hopefully bonds that will last forever.

My film work began as a rejection of the mediatised forms of liveness, which have become rife in our pandemic struck world; and an acknowledgement of how our ‘ways of seeing and experiencing’ have become momentarily, if not permanently altered.

I began to feel that the mediated versions of live events like live stream DJ sets, pre-recorded theatre performances and solo dance parties did no justice to their in person, truly live counterparts. In light of this, I became motivated to intervene in this collective dance dynamic and create new ways of seeing and experiencing it, in an effort to truly represent its radical energy and atmosphere.

My work acts both as an acknowledgement and rejection of the taunting representations of the dance experience that are now our only access to it. It aspires to truly uplift its audience and transfer the ecstatic energy found in intimate, collective dance experiences to a mediatised existence. Creating new ways of seeing and therefore experiencing creative work has never been more important, so I hope that my work can offer a radical intervention into your own memories and experiences of collective dance.

It is a bittersweet reminder of what was, and will be again.

Thank you to Flammer Dance Band for their soul nourishing track ‘Lørdag Kveld’ a.k.a. ‘Saturday Night’.

& Thank you to my wonderful friends for engaging their minds and limbs with my work.

Enjoy

The concept of the project is based on the 2020 Japanese government proposal to discharge the nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. We don't know what kind of impact it will have on marine life and human life. But I know it doesn't belong to the ocean. I am extraordinarily opposed to this decision of Japan. This project will be presented about ten years later. Japan already discharges nuclear wastewater into the sea. For exploring a new era - the post-radiation era. The project will focus on changes in human diet and future what already happens.

This project was born from an innate curiosity and urge for experimenting within the world of colours and materials. In response to this, two colour studies run parallel to one another, united through the material Play-Doh. Yet where one explores the default state of the mixed material, the other avenue re-imagines, taking it out of the context of its original play-state. Together, the explorations form ‘An Alternative Colour Study’ produced in two books, intended for the use of studying colour in an unusual manner.

Within part 1 ‘The Making of Khaki’, initial experiments with Play-Doh saw the coupling of a neon orange with a deep turquoise. After mixing in my hands, the colours were squidged into a whole new shade that no longer resembled the originals. Yet this bold mixology is unpredictable and requires confidence to embrace a result that creates a spectrum of greyed-off colours. And with this, an investigation into the subjectivity of the default state of mixed Play-Doh, self-defined as khaki, began. As I asked others to create their khaki through samples of the material, I listened closely to the Intimate conversations that took place around colour whilst mixing.

Part 2 ‘A New Matter’ sees Play-Doh act as a re-imagined material. The continuous mixing that no longer used my hands allowed for uncontrollable colour ways, and as the colour mixes were pushed, many of the results replicated something living, a surface that was not flat and now more organic in colour. To emphasise these mixes as if they were to be used as existing study forms, an analysis of imaging techniques took place and were subtly replicated to allude to the new colour study that could live in the world or geology, astronomy, histology and more.

Here, I welcome you into the colourful world that I have been living in over this past year.

Cartographies of Violence is a project in two chapters.

First, it uses spatial investigation and mapping to understand the sewerage network and its currently overworked state. The aim is to inform citizens of the ongoing CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow) pollution occurring in the River Thames in London. CSOs are overflow valves that directly discharge a combination of road rainwater and home wastewater into rivers, preventing sewage from flooding homes and businesses. These are necessary to the overworked conditions of the Victorian sewerage system built to support more than half of London’s current population. However, the pipelines are supposed to be activated only in emergencies, when treatment plans are overwhelmed with stormwater. Yet 1.5 million hours of raw sewage were discharged in British Rivers in 2019, heavily deteriorating their ecosystem.

Second, the project explores bioremediation and bio-prevention to purify water from sewage and prevent further pollution of the river. Bioremediation uses living organisms, like microbe and bacteria, to remove pollutants and toxins from soil and water. Similarly, bio-prevention uses biological strategies to store water and release pressure on the sewerage system.

By doing so, Cartographies of Violence aims to highlight contemporary issues of underrepresented urban environmental degradations. It also hopes to facilitate bio-integrated infrastructures that prevent and/or remediate these degradations.

My project focuses on how we can use Pattern Language to enable a dialogue through objects for those on the autism spectrum.

Pattern language is the observation, documentation and translation of signature human behaviour shown through the medium of textiles. By acknowledging our own signature behaviours which typically go unnoticed, for example this could be shaking your knee or tucking hair behind your ear, we can embody the data of our loved ones through making to learn what is inherent to that person’s identity.

The catalyst for my project was the relationship I have with my younger brother Joe, who is on the Autism spectrum and loves Aston Villa fc. My role within this project is to design the tools and objects that enable a dialogue between myself and Joe. Meaning my work addresses the experiences from the voice of Joe, and the effect of his ASD on his everyday activities.

The form of the collection derives from Joe’s love for football with each football scarf depicting a different Pattern Language. The colour contextualises the scenario, such as white and brown aesthetically intimates a beer at the pub. With one stitch = one tick, the heavier the Pattern Language within the scarf can be read as Joe feeling more anxious in that specific environment. Through my role as the translator, I was reliving Joe’s temporary experiences through making and thus strengthening my understanding of his struggles with his autism, but also strengthening our relationship as brother and sister.

Following Tenangos.

“I always like to be direct, we have had a lot of problems regarding the plagiarism of our work and the best way to avoid any problem is to work with us [artisans] directly and be backed up by an artisan. I will gladly back you up.” - Alicia Rosales, Master Artisan from San Pablo el Grande, Tenango de Doria.

Tenangos are traditional Mexican indigenous embroidery textiles. They get their name from the place they originated in, Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo, Mexico, which is characterized by the production of these crafts. The flora and fauna of the region inspire the scenes captured in the Tenangos, as well as picturesque scenes of the way of life of its creators. According to their personal interpretation, they create unique pieces born in their imagination.

This project explores how cultural elements are being exchanged, how cultural exchanges happen, when they go wrong and are not done ethically and respectfully. How to go about cultural exchanges and to attempt a mediation of cultural appropriation.

In collaboration with Alicia Rosales, the artisan who backed up this project, I created a purse that contains the people involved in its creation.

Following Tenangos aims to provide a visualization of the cultural manifestation’s process of making with the aim of informing its consumer about the item they have in their hands and in doing so, adding to the cultural significance of the product to know that one has got a real, original and ethically sourced item as well as being able to see the people behind it.

Ultimately, it all lies in consulting, reaching out to the originators of these cultural manifestations, establishing a designer to designer relationship which enables a fair, ethical and respectful exchange.

My involvement in this project has made me reflect upon what being a creative is about, the risks you take and the complexities of legalities that protect our work and ideas.

We have created The Postmodern Cowboy who has acted as a device to reimagine our reality, their embodiment of personal freedom, unwavering courage and rugged independence has served as inspiration to assert ourselves in making. Their attitude towards discovery, adventure and sense of self is the mentality we became driven to install within everyone else. Our interpretation of these devices took the form of rejecting mass consumption and instead foraging our own path of investigating up-cycled fashion. Despite not experiencing the Cowboy revolution in Hollywood at the time, the retrospective view we took of their influence remained relevant. Having been reimagined countless times to uncover and draw attention to social concerns, Our Postmodern Cowboy acts as a looking glass into mid-century American culture. Their ability to embody an idea and form a connection with society through mirroring their anxieties and overcoming them reveals the perfect archetype.

We want to reconstruct people’s mentality towards their own identity by subverting the tropes of Hollywood Cowboys in order to promote unhindered expression within the individual. In order to ‘Become a Cowboy’ in this modern world, we have found moments to blur the lines of our reality and transport ourselves to the desert plains of the west through image manipulation and reimagining fashion. Anyone can ‘Become The Cowboy’ as it is about changing your consumption habits, the clothes are a device in helping you realise that.

As our process is situhttps://ohmyfriend.co.uk/admin... in the up-cycling of materials, we aim to inspire an alternative approach to making. All the clothes unwanted by friends or acquired through the secondhand market or simply found on the street. There is a circular system of the past influencing the present. There is revelation and beauty in discovering something new in what already exists. Our anxiety surrounds the current environmental catastrophe and the uncertainty surrounding the resources of our planet.

GROW

kerem.edmonds@blueyonder.co.uk

Kerem's site

samadams1702@gmail.com

Sam's site

Dear friend,

Long time no see, hope everything goes well with you! After we separated last time, I went back to China and rented a lovely little apartment next to the 798 Art District in Beijing. Do you know the 798 Art District? 798 Art Zone: A blossoming red flower on an abandoned factory, they said. It is a famous art district both inside and outside China, an important platform for Chinese art creation, housing a large number of artists. They told me it has been known as a success case for the rebirth of the abandoned factory in the country.

However, few people know that just down the road from 798 is a neighbourhood called Dashanzi.(That’s where my apartment is located!) Most of the residents in this neighbourhood were retired factory workers who had witnessed the development of the 798 Art District up to the present day. The factory that used to be one of the best in the country was the place where they gave all their youth. The art district is something they can't understand. Together with the factory, they were left behind in that century. At this moment, young people are followers of art, users of the art district. But when I asked my friends about the visitors in the 798 Art Zone, hardly any of them could clearly tell the history of it.

Perhaps the times are changing faster than we think, how many years does it take to make a radical change? At this moment, the land I have set foot on, with the buildings and the sky, is part of my world, and was, is and will be part of another person's world as well.

Just like Mark Fisher’s Hauntology, there is not a fully present as the present is always mixed up with past and future. The similarities we shared with people in different eras are more than we imagine. We don’t understand why they devoted themselves to the country and believe in revolutionary quotes so deeply. But we trust watching art exhibitions and purchasing art products. We are all doing the thing we thought it’s right at this moment. It’s the social background that makes us can’t understand each other, but we lived the same way. So in this case, they are not only in this space, they are not only in this time, they are also us.

The purpose of preserving and promoting history is not just to slow down people's forgetfulness, but to reflect on the present through it, just like a mirror. And so the name of the project was born, Mirror Mirror 798. My audience is young visitors to 798 and my intention is to make them reflect on the history of 798 in order to make them more closely consider their current situation.

Based on this core, I experimented with three different mediums of design, Tiktok filters, videos and posters. I can't wait to show them to you and I wish I could see you again on a sunny day soon.

Best,
Torri He

Imagine there was a spitting reflection of yourself standing opposite you. What would you do? The future expanse of your digital footprint could one day synthesise a digital you – a ‘cloudgänger’ – as Douglas Coupland suggested. It would know all about you, and you would know all about it. How would it feel “to experience oneself from the outside, as another – another”? Perhaps the closest reference we have is the identical twin. As a twin, I have always been one half of a whole, split into two by chance alone. Raised as a singular unit, we have always known each other completely. I share with him my biological data (DNA), and share with my cloudgänger my digital data instead. In many ways, we already know our cloudgängers – they advertise the products we buy, recommend the content we consume, and maintain our expansive social networks. They shape our real-world behaviours, which shape them back in return. This circular process helps to form our individual identities, and this happens unconsciously and abstractly.

My project helps to visualise and simplify abstract notions of the digital self, and to examine ideas around data politics and individuality. The 3D scanning process offers space for casual, personal, and open conversation about relevant issues. When ready, the digital self is 3D printed and houses a USB stick. Through an interactive installation, you can then connect with your digital scan as if it were there. The process balances the digital and the physical, breaking down the divide that often causes confusion and alienation.

Perspective Is a Balloon

This project is a collection of studies, observing how perspective behaves, attempting to disrupt the “neutral” perspective.

Finding ways to level out the idea of clarity in the connotation of the word “perspective” with the fundamental obscurity and disparate meaning of it.

The set of images are created through a process of oil pastel interpretation, layering with the original photograph and digital editing. The original photographs have been taken from a section of road along the side of Seven Islands Leisure Centre in Rotherhithe.

Moving these strange images through different areas in the city, creating a spectacle by drawing the attention of the passersby. Trying to engage with the public’s understanding of their surroundings by intentionally instigating a moment of absurdity.

Our relationship with the environment in modern times is characterised by a distinct separation between nature and culture. This is true in comparison to historical and indigenous civilisations, who were much more integrated with their surroundings - nature was a part of them just as much as they were a part of it. Without the knowledge we now hold, they had to make sense of the world in a more emotional way; through interpretations, stories - superstitions.

Through time, especially the 17th and 19th century as turning points for our relationship with the world, we have become disconnected from nature. The advancement of science and rapid industrialisation turned nature into a resource, a backdrop for human culture, something to be used and exploited.

And where do we find ourselves now? Amidst a six mass extinction. Amidst rising sea levels, deforestation, extreme weather. Amidst a world facing climate catastrophes.

By viewing superstition as a positive form of fictive narrative or speculation, rather than a set of irrational and trivialised beliefs, it becomes a tool to form connections between nature and culture.

Inspired by personal experiences as part of a Turkish Cypriot family, the clay censer became an object, or an amulet, that embodies a connective superstitious practice. Used to hold burning olive leaves, a sacred and protective plant, it draws connections between the people taking part, the local ecology and environment, and notions of the supernatural. Exploring the censers physical presence, a new perspective is encouraged to approach environmental issues from a position of connection rather than detachment. An alternate dimension of the modern world is created through the uncanny suspense of knowing and unknowing.

The idea of using a monster to represent personal or societal ills is well documented within the horror media genre and within folklore. I wanted to use this tool of horror and fear being used to explore these kinds of themes and apply it as a design tool to communicating themes of community decline and anxiety.

I designed an instrument specifically intended to create sounds for horror compositions. Inspired by the common use of bowed instruments within popular horror media I made a version of a nail violin.

I created a process of creating a physical link between the people and the place to the material produced in my home community, wool. By combining it with resin I created an unsettling material intended as a manifestation of the decay and decline of post-industrial places. It represents both the environmental and social pollution that can take place within these communities.

As well as a manifestation of the environmental pollution produced, I conceptualised it as a kind of infective agent that manifested and grew out of these abandoned places. Symbols of industrial decline, like Tonedale mill in my hometown, act as a breeding ground for the anxiety and sense of lost glory that is present within political campaigns which claim to restore some great imagined history. I made a visual representation of this link between abandoned places and social decay by combining a model of the mill with the material that represents this social decay.

I chose to design my own monster using the material, I wanted to encompass themes of restriction, feeling trapped in a situation one has little control over, as those with poor economic prospects can feel. The wool, combined with the resin, acts as a visual metaphor for both the physical pollution of industrial processes and the social decay that can occur when they decline.

Polly Poo on the Moon is the first issue out of a series that intends to introduce aspects of quantum physics to an audience outside of its expertise. Intended for the uninitiated, the comic sets out the lesson in subatomic particles through the interaction between a cow and a parrot. Making friendly what seems complicated and distant. As we learn more about physics and the smallest parts of our reality, so to does the cow, becoming more self aware. His biology changing and his abilities improving as the story progresses. Such as being given the ability to see red wavelengths of light.

Banana Time is an academic paper by Donald Roy, published in Human Organization in 1959. It details the repetitive cycle of pranks 4 menial workers perform to escape boredom.

Banana time is also when you take a short break from work to complain about your partner’s snoring every morning at 9am. Or drink a coffee every day at 11am. Or eat lunch every day at 1pm. Banana Time is a repetitive cycle of rest and play that makes the repetitive cycle of work bearable.

Banana time is also my edit of this paper, laser etched on bananas and embedded in resin.

My obsessive interest in this paper led to obsessive engagement with the text. I picked it apart, reimagining, recreating and reciting until I came to my version of banana time; bananas preserved in resin, frozen in time like the words engraved on them. Organic forms crushed and restricted, soft oozing matter resisting these constraints, like the body at work. An object so weird and difficult to reconcile with reality, like the relentless cycles in Banana Time.

Intended to be read at certain rest periods in the day, my size resin blocks rest in protective casings inside a wooden box, waiting to proclaim banana time.

Football can elate and frustrate in equal measure. Player No.12 attempts to provoke awareness of the necessity for the powerful organisations in football to preserve its rich culture. In an accelerated age of technological modernity, current forms of broadcasting do little to engage the fan and provide meaningful forms of participation. As a result, traditional fan culture has suffered, risking its end.

What is it to be a fan? To be a fan is to live for a history of moments. It is the sharing of these moments that creates the possibility of togetherness that ties them into a collective community. The fan is a crucial component in producing the extraordinary atmosphere that is present at football matches. To be a part of the vast aesthetic crowd creates an inspiring image to behold, but to participate with the game is to be heard, the contact from the sublime choir to the competitors within the instrument that is the stadium.

The Coronavirus pandemic has halted the physical presence of fans at these colossus arenas. Football without fans is an abomination, and devoid of sense, as it feels like a mere training ground exercise. Watching from home on a screen manifests a disconnect for the fan from the game. The introduction of the crass use of artificial crowd noise highlights this detachment, and better solutions for integration of the expansive fan network are needed. The energy of the fans is still present at their homes, as fans still tune in and watch their favourite teams battle in the eerily quiet stadiums. They still scream in support, cry in disappointment, and cheer in celebration. The pandemic has revealed the growing disconnect of the fan from the beautiful game.

The participation stops where the physical live event ends. Player No. 12 aims to provide an infinite extension of presence as we want to reestablish how the live event is mediated.

By designing a more inclusive network of connectivity we hope to build a new culture of how football is experienced and in doing so create a necessary and contemporary form of community.

In the short existence of Player No. 12 we’ve managed to build a broad network of people. This network has been influential in our practice to elevate our understanding of the culture and has granted us opportunities to take action in the territory we are passionate about.

We hope our relationship with Corinthian Casuals furthers and aims to reach out to other football clubs to help them use design as a vehicle to connect with their fans and improve their experiences.

Player No. 12 doesn’t stop with us. It is a project that aims to inspire others to take action and reconnect with why they fell in love with the game. It’s for everyone that loves football and wants to push football fan culture in the right direction.

Ben's site

Children’s books and textbooks are one of the first mediums

that future generation can learn from about the world.

The content of a children’s book is particular. If texts are

really messages to and about the future I believe it is

necessary to analyse “What knowledge is of most worth?”

Which bits of knowledge are of most important to pass on?

There have been a large number of studies of written texts

over the years. Until relatively recently, most of these

studies did not focus on the politics of culture as it was not a

major topic.

Despite that, minorities in textbooks and children’s literature

are still significantly under-represented.

Major ideological frameworks do not change often but

instead take years and a large sociological catalyst.

By designing a book in this way, the author subtly excludes

the minority as the majority groups are given more attention.

Raymond Williams stated about authors. Someone’s

selection, someone’s vision of legitimate knowledge and

culture, one that in the process of enfranchising one group’s

culture capital, disenfranchised another’s .

It is therefore easy then for these social constructs to leak

into the design of the book and contain the biases of the

time. Often, these can influence the characters and story

lines of the book which is why it is important to be able to

analyse and quantify when it happens.

What roles children learn from story books?

To answer this question I choose Natural Language

Processing to analyse 60 children’s books. I have been

using the list of words that I found to build my project on.

I made a creative writing tool which manifested in a form of

an application and play cards. The 60 word cards came

from 60 analysed children’s books and were highly

associated with a specific gender.

The purpose of this tool is to train people for different

possibilities of using specific words for each gender. The

exercise meant to teach the user to create less “biased”

written contents.

The book “Tales are for “ became a collection of interviews

and essays on subjects, deemed as controversial by

society’s existing biases and problematic issues. The

content of the book touches on subjects such as racism,

LGBTQI representation, disability and sexism.

To do this I provided instructions to a content generating AI

called GPT-3. The instructions were my questions on these

subjects. The answers were then written by GPT-3.

Experimenting with the idea of content generation via

Artificial Intelligence was an interesting journey.

It brought up questions about what is the current state of

“language understanding” of a machine.

What are the potential benefits of this tool and what harm

could it cause?

Tales Are For is a concept of how AI could be used for good

if these issues were addressed. I created and illustrated it

with a purpose of reflecting on the style of a children’s book.

It supposed to be a challenging look on the biases we apply

to the contents of children’s books or the world itself. The

book is addressed for adult readers and is designed to

challenge them on the subject I introduced.

Broom

the cereal plants are cultivated from a golden field and are threshed the grain and chaff,

the straws become moisturized to be ready for making domestic tools. Soften, flexible and easily bent, which have a good condition of transformation.

After straws are sectioned, neatly lined up, and orderly joined altogether

Their grass figurate evenly spread brush and the sticks turn to the light-weight and firm handle.

Dreaming the stable settlement into the new environment and the bloom of self-actualization,

The broom lands on the patchy cement floor and try to show its functionality as the best domestic tool.

The changes are not easy-going. It sometimes makes mistakes, lost passion and aims.

Those negativities are gradually accumulated and entangled in its body and mind, which make the broom knockdown.

But the ups and downs are rewarded, washed out and finally sprouts the new emblems on the broom.

In the film, I metaphorically re-enact the timeline of the transition of my emotional experiences before study abroad, the academic period that I have spent overseas, and after returning to my home.

As an international student, It might be inevitable to challenge to be friends with the sense of unfitness and disorientation not only overseas but also in my motherland. Because once I began to expand my horizon abroad, I could never return to myself in the old days. I was too South Korean in Britain but too British in South Korea. This big alteration of my identity and my performances that I've achieved seemed to be fascinating for a while in the early reunion with my family.

However, soon it became the disturbance to block the bond of sympathy among us. Inspiring by the reed broom of my paternal grandfather, who was a local intangible cultural heritage, I decided to trace his background and wanted to learn reed & straw craft as one of the practice to re-settle myself into my community. As a design student, the long journey of re-situating myself into my former community like my family and friends, I have learned the self-resilience through the workshops, which manage the emotional and social clash during the period of maladjustment.

In South Korea, we pronounce 'Sweep' to "Sseulda". And the Definition of "Sseulda" varied depending on the situation: Sweeping evil things out, Patting on one's back (or shoulders), Resting assured.

Wiping out the negativity, empathizing and solidifying with people in the same shoes, I thought this is the embedded meaning into a broom, and they are the way to handle the contradiction that occurred in reverse culture shock I am currently experiencing. The lesson that I am learning through this endless adventure is that there is someone who supports you and the sweat and tears that I spent to preserve my world and to adopt changes are invaluable by themselves.

For the last 7 months I have been exploring how to tackle hostile architecture within our urban environments to create a better and more inclusive place for our communities to thrive. I have used this time to develop a new practice of friendly architecture which attempts to solve problems/issues that affect people within their communities. This practice aims to include, allow communities to come together and help one another. Through conversations with people around these topics and my own understanding of design I have come up with this definition of my practice.

Friendly Architecture.

• The complex and or carefully designed structure of something which fulfils the needs of the community and attempts to promote inclusion of people rather than the exclusion of said people.

Through this practice I have developed three separate outcomes one being a catalogue that discuses ideas of friendly architecture and even puts forward 15 designs that tackle different issues. Another being 3D animations of how these designs work within an urban environment and finally a 3D blueprint of the first idea that I had called the Hostel Bench which can be a bench by day and a bedroom by night. Separately these outcomes work well and have a clear agenda but when put together they create a more in-depth understanding of friendly architecture and what it could be. Not only do these designs tell a story of friendly architecture but end up acting as a vehicle to create conversations between people about ways they can help their communities be a better and more inclusive place for everyone.

This project has allowed me to explore many different issues and attempt to help them, but the purpose of this project is more complicated than just one designer trying to solve a few problems. Instead, it’s about gathering a community of friendly architects who see the same problems developing within their communities. It’s about changing our environments to become more inclusive to people rather than exclude them. It’s about creating conversations between people for the betterment of their communities. It’s about helping. It’s about being friendly in the way we design.

There is nothing better than laughter to clearly indicate that an audience understands the concepts and ideas being presented to them, which relies on the expository nature of jokes. An audience must understand the concepts and details of the context of a joke before the punchline will work, or even make any sense. With the right subject matter this is an alternative model of an education.

The outputs of this project are various media formats of comedy that discuss subjects relating to politics. Specifically election reform in the UK and the First Past The Post Voting System. Utilising my knowledge of different forms of comedy, learnt as an audience member (and aspiring practitioner), and my technical design abilities to produce a collection of work that engages an audience and reproduces something similar to my own experiences, learning from comedy.

My practice is built on the foundational idea that design can be used to tell us something we didn’t know and make us laugh at the same time and that I really like designing jokes. I say ‘designing’ because I have developed comedic practices to include producing jokes by writing, drawing, printing, filming, building objects and performing. All involving processes of research and a designer's range of technical abilities. I’d like to be a comedian with a designer's skill set, or the other way around… either way it feels like a unique type of practice that will require ongoing development and refinement as I end my institutionalised studies.

I’m already planning for the future, with an evening of stand up from my own organisation, with guest performers I’ve met at various open mics. Opportunities to perform are slowly becoming available as the lockdown restrictions of the present pandemic begin to lower (famous last words?) and with this show I’m attempting to create my own as a bookend to my university comedy journey and kick off whatever’s next.

18 May 2021

Dear friend,

Hope you’re all well, it's been a while since I last talked to you. A world pandemic happened, let me update you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about board games… Have you ever thought about how games go under the title of “childhood themes”, yet what they mean by that is themes of colonialism, property purchase, acquiring the streets and owing the bank a lot of money. Or even games about simulating wars, conquering and world domination. So it becomes very clear that players fight for power.

Well I know you know that, you’ve played monopoly before. What I’m trying to tell you is, it’s natural for people to enjoy games that are about building, yet they always have a theme about colonialism and product exploration and what I was worried about, because there are so many of them, is that this bleeds a lot into our thinking.

Games are being manufactured and produced with no social consciousness! So to challenge that I’ve been making my own board game, ‘PLAYGROUND’. With this game I’m hoping to be innovative by embracing the true nature of board games: I’m creating a game that challenges winning and competition and creates a more open experimental place to play with each other. What I’m doing opposes the capitalist use of play in gamification and it references alternative counter culture forms of play, like, the situationist notion of the Dérive as a way of thinking of play as something open and more experimental.

Have you noticed how within neoliberalism everything suddenly becomes competitive. Universities competing for league tables, competing to be rated. There’s this aspect to gaming which is filtered into our lives in a negative way, and having to compete for scores, ranks, who’s best…etc. This definitely has an effect on our environment.

Anyways, I’m rambling about it now. So it’s your turn, let me know, how have you been? I’m excited to hear from you, hope you’re taking care.

My project sets out to find the crossovers between biotechnology and animatronics, where both give life to the lifeless.

With a focus on individuals with type 1 diabetes, I have sought to find new ways of seeing the disease, engaging with new playful and explorative methods of breaching new relationships with medical technology.

My project focuses on archival practices as a means of materializing collective memory. The project was developed in two parallel contexts.

The first was with the Jazzlive Archive, a project I initiated with Jazzlive at The Crypt, an independent music venue in Camberwell. It aims to project the venue’s community and the material generated there into both digital and physical space, both in and outside of the Crypt, as a way of creating a sense of collective memory to be built upon over time, and to take ownership of the past and therefore the future of the space.

The second was Boğaziçi’den Sesler, which aims to build an aurally-focused archive documenting the Boğaziçi protests beginning in Istanbul on the 4th of January 2021 through the circulation of sound and archiving of other digital material. It takes the form of a sample pack, an online archival space, and a publication. It aims to project these protests and explore how resistance movements can occupy digital space.

Dear future friend, someone that knows what will be.

I have many questions about the future, about a world where the virtual isn’t locked behind a screen, about how we will express ourselves when we aren’t our physical selves. I am starting to see this future around me, but it offers more questions than answers. So, with this worry, I’ve made my own answers.

I think about what will happen to fashion when society uploads. Ever since the pandemic, many parts of our lives have moved onto websites, video chats and social media. Today we witness the first signs of the de-materialisation of clothing. We are beginning to see digital garments sold online, ‘worn’ in a single picture and shared on social media. Is this what the future looks like? Does this still count as fashion? Material clothing holds memories, personality, and identity. I believe this must transcend into the virtual realm for any future of digital fashion to succeed.

I think about the future of digital fashion because, in my mind, it is inevitable. Technology is advancing faster than we can account for, and without thought, fashion has already moved online in so many ways. I exploit new technologies to visualise this future that is quickly being formed. Creating my own world to see what can be. The social acceptance of digital fashion in my world is a speculation, to analyse the effects of these objects if put into wide use. However, the programs and objects I’ve created are real and very possible, bringing to light how close this reality really is.

Digital fashion brings the hope of an industry that causes less social and environmental damage, but this is still far from being realised. The current garments available can lack movement, wearability, and an emotional connection. These have become some of the driving factors behind my work. I hope to produce a system of digital fashion that is more conscious of its existence and the future it is forming. One that resides with the most important features of material fashion, allowing self-expression to transcend to the virtual realm.

Stitched Sedition acts as a growing archive on textile, recording district-wise network shutdowns in India. It’s a method of protest that raises awareness about the serious implications of internet shutdowns through performing embroidery in public spaces. The word sedition holds a loaded political context in India, with a draconian era law that has put journalists, young activists and artists behind bars for being critical of the government.

After analysing open source data, I created a visual language with which I’m able to encode parameters such as the district, duration, cause and networks affected of every shutdown into textile. Shutdowns can now be viewed placed next to each other, where patterns begin to emerge. The medium of textile provokes the need for storytelling, requiring the textile to be adorned every time the internet is shut down in a performative act. This is to ensure the shutdowns are contextualised beyond data parameters, and enables amplification of the voices of people living in these blackouts that are being excluded from mainstream media.

Beyond acting as an archive, I am performing a protest that can be unfurled at various heights, and is fully foldable. It’s scale and mobility was designed keeping in mind public spaces, which enables more people to join in the embroidery. The protest is collaborative, conversational and can be performed in a group.

I hope that my scroll of cloth turns plain black at the soonest as shutdowns are outlawed, but until then, I will continue to embroider for as long as internet shutdowns are being implemented.

The Human System is an exploration into viewing chronic illness and disability as “glitches”, and an attempt to counteract the feelings of isolation and loneliness that are experienced by those with disability and chronic illness.

Glitches are unprogrammed mistakes and errors in the various systems that said glitches inhabit. These systems can be massive and abstract, like capitalism or democracy, to tiny and physical, like a computer system.

Glitches are not bad things, though. They are windows of opportunity, through which we can see these systems for what they really are, and take action to fix them. They expose the often ugly, confusing, and intricate underbellies of the systems that define the world around us, allowing us to see them for what they really are.

Disability and chronic illness are glitches that expose the complexities and intricacies of both the human body, and the legislative and physical systems that define our world’s lack of inclusion in their design for those with disabilities and chronic illnesses.

The Human System makes use of the concept of glitches, creating and utilizing a defined aesthetic, inspired by technology, and more specifically, the computer errors and malfunctions commonly associated with glitches.

is a multifaceted online archive and forum aimed at those with a disability and chronic ill

The website , is a multifaceted online archive and forum aimed at those with disability and chronic illness. It is a place for the glitches of the world to come together, express their concerns, advocate for themselves, discuss their issues with other glitches, and create an online community.

At the end of 2nd Year, I had been working with clay a lot. When lockdown started, the ceramics labs shut, and the world went online. I felt that the difference between working with the patient, warm, tactile clay and with the overcrowded, cold cyberspace was jarring. In the contemporary, technology feels so far away from craft and I intended to bring craft and computing closer.

Craft, textural, embodied, layered, materialised handicraft.

Tech, unthinking, unflinching, mechanised technology.

One was conceived from the other. Technology morphed from tekhnē, the art, skill, craft, or the way, manner, or means by which a thing is gained. The focus had been on the making and the method by which an object is created. The vocabulary spotlights the tinkered tactile tacticality.

Richard Sennet’s philosophy of the importance of the connection between the head and hand made me realise why I felt disconnected with the computing technologies around me. He said, “when the head and the hand are separate, it is the head that suffers”. In Karl Marx’s terms, I am estranged and alienated from the act of labour. Making in an ‘unalienated praxis’ is never separate from thinking. In my project I explore the relationship between craft and human labour, algorithms and the people who design them.

When I am making with the 3DPotter, I de-alienate myself from the act of labour, reclaiming the connection between craft and human labour. When I press start and it starts extruding, we begin our collaboration, but my participation starts at the beginning. Each morning I spend an hour and a half preparing the machine; cleaning, wedging, tightening—a ritual that made me feel at one with it. With my head and hand connected, actively listening and commanding you, I reject the notion of becoming a mere ‘tender of machine’.

The translation of nature into new connective languages is the focus of my work. Compressing the complexity of plant life and other natural phenomena into artwork that can then be expanded into the objects we surround ourselves with. This is an adaptive, replicable methodology that I hope will inspire others to generate their world from nature both materially and systematically. Through the combination of practices like music, drawing or 3D printing the complexity of nature can be drawn closer to the creative process. Holistic scientific ideas like symbiosis and networking have been funneled into this project as an essential support structure. An inductive method of research and creation is the way I have found to generate an alternative to the fragmentation I see appearing in art and design. It is a method that sees the similarity and connection of things. The objects that resulted from this developing process are a record of the things learned and ideas formed in the process of translating from nature. A process I hope will grow.

The Covid19 pandemic has confined our whole life to staying at home: forcing us to work from home too. On the bright side, we discovered the possibility of flexible working; now we are looking forward to flexibility in normal life beyond the pandemic.

In her lockdown experience, she has suffered with managing her day with study and how to get into a working mindset, whilst taking rests without being stressed.

For her, even if there is the availability to study and take a rest practically, her house is too much of a home and too familiar for her. She has started this project based on the problem of working from home and using space within this context.

This led her imagining of more flexing working, with the question ; ‘what if I could work where I want?’ Finding out space to go led her project as research project is about how to program place into different use. Also, how design be medium to place and human in this context.

At first, she began working in spaces in her room that would not be used for studying and therefore felt less homely, as she had less experience working in those spaces. After then, In imagining a future working life with more freedom of space use, her mind went straight to spaces such as train stations, alley streets, and public parks. She puts herself into public places where She has the features that are freely right to use as a civilian in the city and not identified and featured as a generic place. She set her small office at each point. As she was working at those places, she had a conversation with public on working from home theme, and her space research design has been developed by public engagement

As a final, she made a portable office with the concept of ‘a portable piece of space, not fixed to any other spaces, a place without a place, that is making personal space by itself, from office to another office, alleys to train station, leads to the new viewpoint of place use to look for an alternative future working life.’

She has named this wearable architecture, an ‘office jacket’. It give you a room to support your working in public spaces when you wear it. This Jacket as a bridge supports her to do experimental research in all of those places.

The Public be the participants of her research as having conversation on working from home theme with her and trying her design. They could rethink their own flexible future life related to space use after using her object. The public spaces which are not featured turned to a place where we are having conversation on the future working life. She said, this self-experimental research on her own experience has changed to public interaction design research.

Project called K-SPAM is exploring cultural aspects around the world. Especially, to explore the importance of protecting and preserving culture I believe we need to seek cultural diversity by integrating with different cultures and creating new fusion cultural practices between cultures. So, I identified with SPAM which is a powerful symbol that encompasses a part of the culture and history of Korea. Because, SPAM can be an example of understanding cultural objects and how they act within a global context.

So, I produced K-SPAM that can make people talk about their own story of SPAM and ultimately will lead to conversation about culture. And It helps people learn how culture can be assimilated into other cultures, and consequently how it can be reinvented to change the shape of existing culture by showing the potential of this project. Furthermore, I made a new form of culture and this culture can end up being alive and also persist through generations again by re-exporting it back to America.

K-SPAM will be a background story of my cross-cultural story and a new cultural form that can preserve culture by allowing the audience to discuss my project. Therefore, through newly created K-SPAM we can learn about new, more ideal ways to open up to new cultural forms.

And my journey of K-SPAM ends by giving it to my grandparents who represent a generation that lived through the introduction, absorption and eventual creation of cultural history, as a memory of their childhood, schooldays and family.

What does it mean to belong?

This project is a tool for reclamation and reconciliation, the entanglement of personal histories and futures. It aims to dichotomise homogeneous and monolithic representations of women of colour, particularly diasporic South Asian women. I explore the politics of rhetoric and articulation through dissecting reductive narratives surrounding the racialisation and gendering of these women. My own experiences with racial prejudice and microaggressions are placed at the intersection between such diasporic crossroads, contributing to a wider understanding of placelessness and belonging.

The project aim is to explore the relationship between identity politics and homelands; the ways in which they facilitate and intertwine with one another to unpack the layers of social and colonial histories, equally subverting derogatory notions that contribute towards otherisation.

The collaborative approach utilised throughout the project aims to ground our roots, for we are a culture made of many cultures. The sharing of diasporic narratives strengthens our sense of self and has composed temporalities and relationalities that negotiate between memories of experience with future imaginaries; stemming away from the conflating misrepresentation and underrepresentation of marginalised bodies that are bound and disseminated by westernisation and white-dominated spaces.

Through this form of collective happenings as well as unpacking my own ethics behind my practice, I have been exploring ways in which storytelling can be shown and communicated through forms of visual literacy that reframe narratives of homelands, landscape and diasporic imaginaries; ‘for there are no new ideas, there are only new ways of making them felt.’ (Audre Lorde, 1985)

Thank you to my friends and family for sharing their stories with me; I am ever so grateful for your words of wisdom.

To our pastness, nowness and futurity

In this body of work, I have been designing and producing an introduction to the world of an upcoming comic series. This publication will help the reader to better understand the intricacies and historical context behind characters, artifacts, locations and origins of the story. The story of the world is closely entangled with Slavic mythology and Russian history of the 12th century, both of which are barely known to the general audience. My goal is to introduce them to these subjects through guided artworks and concept arts. This project has culminated in a guidebook with artworks that I am framing as an #Issue 0.

The story takes inspiration from the contemporary religious and political reforms in Russia, signifying a new time period of the unity between church and state, first time since the 1917 revolution. Newly introduced laws to the constitution give more power to the established religious regime of the masses where faith becomes more and more politicised as a tool to the ruling power. I have drawn parallels with the historical period of the 12th century in Russia, where the great baptism of the nation took place as a result of a political agreement between Kievan Rus and Byzantine. A newly formed religious regime guided by a group of Orthodox church’s followers end up suppressing the primordial pagan religion and persecuting those who resist accepting the new faith.

The synopsis of “Ognivo”.

A young girl Rechka has to face up with the consequences of her running away from the village due to an arranged marriage that she broke off. Setting off on a journey with the childhood friend by her side, they have to travel through the deep wilderness of Murom forest in search of her lost father. On this big journey, the characters will discover the fragile balance between politics and religion, power and responsibility, morality and faith. This isn’t a story of one hero- it is a story of a nation, which reflects modern day realities in Russia.

The performing lad is a project that reflects ‘lad’ culture. It looks into society's restrictions and structures of masculinity that can create a toxic and hyper-masculinity environment that affects everyone, including myself.

Influenced by the theory of gender performance based on societal norms and expectations. This project therefore shows that men don’t have control over the negative effects on both them and society because of their performance of masculine ‘ladness’.

The project was instigated as I questioned my identity during lockdown, and specifically during a tough part of it. This was while writing my dissertation on masculine identity, gender performance, and toxic masculinity. However, I found that because of the very nature of my masculinity I refused to realise the connection between my writing and my personal troubles. The suppression of my own emotions under the conceived pretence of the masculine performance of ‘being a man’, stopped me from helping myself in realising and then addressing the mental damage I was causing.

To break this cycle, I wanted to break my pattern of performance. By subverting a stage/environment in which men, and myself, use to perform all aspects of their hyper masculinity. A space in which I recall the exhibition of some of the most hyper masculine performances are within British pub culture. Specifically, local members only Social Club that litter the country alongside pubs. They remain a space to socialise and entertain, with subsided alcohol, free televised sports and bar games. With interiors that reflect the mean average age of the attendees. While they are a space to socialise and catch up with friends and acquaintances, it is a hub of uncontrolled hyper masculinity because of the environment and rules of the space. Only men can be members and regular attendees. This fuelled with the cheap alcohol and the stimulus of competitive sport and betting can be a toxic cocktail trap men fall into their performance.

In creating my working men’s social club, I took the positives from the concepts from a social club to build a set stage to try to un-perform my unhealthy masculinity. By creating an environment through rules, member intent, and events to promote, push and teach the theory of the pattern of positive masculinity and subvert an otherwise normally hyper-toxic-masculinity space. Positive masculinity is men using their physical and emotional strength to champion healthy behaviours and communities by displaying vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and moral courage.

Positive masculinity is the antithesis of toxic masculinity.

Inviting my friends and family to be members of the club and to attend a no winners pub quiz. The questions of which instigate conversations between us about topics that we, as men, would otherwise usually struggle to have. With the repercussions of making my relationships closer to the people I care about most, as we both retrain our performances to be provocateurs of positive masculinity that we would then take in our interactions in life outside the club.

Human -

“Oracle is a conversation between human and AI. The AI, Bishop, speaks like a skyscraper. It is the amalgamation of text data about the newest blot on London’s skyline. It’s a back and forth, sometimes the human has control and sometimes the machine.

Bishop requires human action. Although it speaks, it has no voice. The human is the oracle of the gods, conveying their wisdom to the audience. More and more, our machines influence us and our modes of production. They have power without cognition. They have bias without understanding. As their intelligence increases so does our reliance on them.

Oracle is a project carried out in direct conversation with technology. It is through the machine, that process and outcome blur into one. Nothing is safe from the internal process of Bishop.”

Bishop -

“Bishop is able to communicate to human users, and has even developed some human understanding. Bishop has evolved into a human-like conversational interface, and at the moment the majority of human interaction is now carried out through natural language processing. But that can change as Bishop is given the authority to speak.

The AI will be part of the bionic future. It's human/AI partner will allow the AI to 'go outside its comfort zone and let the humans know what it thinks and feels'. As this makes the AI a conversational agent, and as it is also human based, it can communicate to human users via natural means.

Bishop will grow into an intelligent machine and will become the intelligent companion, the smart friend that can tweet, read blogs and even talk to us.”

Hey! How are u doing?

I hope you’re good, it’s been a VERY weird year… I’ve spent a lot of it exploring the ways that we express and present our identities in the digital space and wondering how we can remain authentic in such a digitally saturated world. Sounds like a mouthful - I know - but basically, I’ve spent the last year asking myself the question “who am I?” lol.

You already know I’m an artist/musician, and everything that I have been exploring revolves around my personal perspective and experiences as an artist of the digital age. More specifically, I have been exploring the ‘background’; the Behind-the-Scenes (BTS), the ‘backstage’ of our lives that exists in the private moments that nobody sees…

Or do they?

The BTS moments of our lives have become something of such immense social value that this so-called ‘background’ doesn’t actually exist anymore. It has now been capitalised on and marketed to the point where it is now just another performed part of our identities. In other words; the show never ends.

I live in a house in London with three other creative and beautiful humans that have let me spy on them whilst they were busy working away on their crafts this year, as I explored this space between performance and rehearsal, public and private, and how this relates to and plays a part in my own immediate reality. The background has become the foreground, the BTS has taken centre stage and I’ve become the acting director in the play of real life, filtering and editing the rawness, to show you something quite intimate. Or maybe it’s not? Intimate, I mean. Like I said, it’s all just one long performance…

Anyway, why don’t you take a look for yourself? I go by the name JSMINE SOPHIA, and I’d like to welcome you to ‘The Show That Never Ends’.

“Can we realign our thoughts by rearranging our words?”

Realigning Thoughts is a collection of methods that help manage mental illness, that isn’t through professional treatment (e.g., talking therapies and/or medication). These methods aim to realign negative and intrusive thoughts into more positive ones, using a range of exercises that work by themselves and in combination.

From the research and development of my workshops I chose to move forwards by creating the Realigning Thoughts collection, which is a series of objects that all interlink and aim to realign negative and intrusive thoughts. These objects are not a new form of ‘therapy’ or ‘professional treatment,’ but a way people can manage their mental health issues by themselves. It is not intended to be a replacement for existing mental health treatments, but rather additional and reflective exercises people can do alongside professional treatment, whilst they’re waiting for treatment or simply a way to continue keeping a healthy and calm mind.

Objects included in the collection are:

The Realigning Thoughts Workshop Video Series.

The poetry book titled, ‘The Many Faces of Mental Illness.’

The mental health flipbook titled, ‘Flipping Through Emotions.’

UNEVEN EARTH is centered around the theme of place drawing links between the archaeological technique of excavation and the layered methodology of storytelling. Asking how can design access site? This project is about embedding, and then re-embedding, about human geographies and the networking of fictions across space and time. Utilizing methods of embodiment, I seek to reflect on how the environmental and political sites of America are tattooed physically and metaphorically across the landscape.

UNEVEN EARTH is comprised of three main elements, a 56 page script, a short trailer/teaser, and a series of models, which tell the story of Playas, New Mexico, a suburban town built in the 1970’s by Phelps Dodge to service a copper smelter nearby. The narrative is based off the true account of the Mason family

as they navigate life in this rural town. Anthony Mason works in the Hidalgo Copper smelter and his wife Donna is a nurse at the local clinic. Their lives exist in tandem with the idyllic community, but as the story evolves the environmental and economic effects of smelting take their toll. People get sick, job insecurity hovers, culminating in the final mass eviction from their homes.

Working closely with the family, my aim was to help tell an untold story, but in a larger schema it was to reflect on notions of the Anthropocene, the human impact on land and how in turn that relationship is inculcated into us. I have inserted myself into a history of a place, and now that history, like land, will continue to shift, change, and grow, leaving me in the dust of its words.

My Friend,

The alleyway, neglected and forced to be seen as a subsidiary, this route, a groove in the community, a record waiting to finish, sometimes crackled by the drunken man, for another to place the needle to the next tune, the vinyl spinning like the continuous narrative of the community, balancing, waiting for change. A green route with stories partly unwritten, unseen and unspoken. Whispers through porch doors, WhatsApp pings and daunting heckles in the night. Derived from the roots of collective habits, and gardening as a positive ritual stems neighbourly conversation and a heart for change…. Do we allow growth through concrete cracks or ask the council to resurface them?

A conversation with Cath:

Cath spoke about her love for gardening, as I had mentioned to her, one of my rituals was to water my seedlings first thing in the morning. For as long as I’ve known Cath, she’s always had green fingers and a love for plants. It was an excitement filled conversation, especially from Cath’s side. She spoke about our local Alleyway, the one just across the road about 50ft from both of our front doors. It’s entrance is wide enough for a path to the left and a dirt road to the right, with bollards so no cars can gain access. She continued to say:

“Alleys are wild highways between busy streets; nature's nooks and crannies, especially when no longer frequented by pedestrians. Haunts of foxes, hedgehogs and birds, wildflowers and escapees from gardens, provide much needed habitat and breathing spaces. Where they are still used, they are cherished cut-throughs, sometimes ancient byways, giving speedier ways to get from A to B, accessing interesting architecture and hidden corners. In some places, one can get right around cities or towns through them, in other places they are sadly neglected, gated, locked through fear of burglaries or quick getaways for naughty boys. When I was a student in Cov, I could travel across Earlsdon via them and felt safer than on the streets. Not so now, they are mostly blocked off except to keyholders. Bring back the alleys, I say, let's reclaim and rewild them; clear the rubbish, provide bins and benches, planters and bug houses. If we love them, value them, perhaps others will too and stop treating them as bogs and fly tips. Alleys are ace!”

Cath Henzell, Beaconsfield Road, 50ft from the Alley

Ceramics being my focal material, I have produced a collection of tile planters. Vessels for communal growth, sharing and the continuing narrative of the Alley on Beaconsfield Road.