TF/20-21
Projects supported in 2020-21.
Ronan Somerville
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, and we have always known each other completely. I share with him my biological data, and share with my cloudgänger my digital data instead. We already know our cloudgängers – they advertise the products we buy, recommend the content we consume, and maintain our expansive social networks.
Using infrared cameras bought with the Tom Fund award, I was able to 3D scan participants for use in both my final film and interactive installation. Through this, we can begin to visualise and interact with our digital selves in a way that is accessible and understandable. In future this technology will only improve and so my project provides a framework for future iterations.
Jacob Morgan
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 valuable 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 Homo sapiens is ancient history.
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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.
Harry Fisher
Over the past year I have undergone an investigation into the future of digital fashion. What will happen to our appearances and forms of expression when society moves online. I have explored and engaged with the current digital fashion industry, and produced many of my own outcomes and programs of digital fashion. I have created my own future, answered my own questions, and presented these speculations through ascending fashion magazines. An example of a world where digital fashion is adopted by the public, how this effects society and raising questions about what it means to ‘wear’ clothes. My world may be a speculation, but the objects and programs created are all real experiments I’ve made using new technologies, demonstrating how close this reality really is.
The Tom Fund allowed me to pay for a short subscription to multiple rendering and tech applications. As a result I was able to explore the industry and topic more freely. Additionally, this helped me move my project out of just speculation, I was then able to create functional programs and digital objects. Thanks to the Tom fund my project developed massively.
Mathilda Taylor
This project began by rejecting the mediatised forms of liveness which have become rife in our pandemic struck world; and an effort to acknowledge 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. Therefore, 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 film work aspires to truly uplift its audience and transfer the ecstatic energy found in intimate, collective dance experiences to its newly mediatised existence.
Creating new ways of seeing and therefore experiencing creative work has never been more important, and the Tom Fund enabled me to do so with high quality camera equipment.
I was determined for my third-year outcomes to achieve an impressive cinematic quality and so the funding was vital. It allowed me to not only elevate the quality of my work, but have the freedom to make mistakes and try again, which is invaluable to a designer trying to get it right!
Antheia Berengaria Panayiotou
‘000DETECTED’ focuses on creating forms that obscure our identity from new technologies found in the advertising world. Advertisers have become more intrusive with their methods of consumer surveillance, moving away from online data collection to delivering adverts through facial-recognition installed billboards throughout public spaces in London. Inspired by CV Dazzle, I have developed patterns that prevent detection by facial-recognition into wearable forms of anti-tech jewellery, allowing the wearer to become undetectable where surveillance is placed.
The Tom Fund made it possible for me to materialise my project into various mediums, enabling me to view options of what would be best suited for anti-tech jewellery. This not only took away a lot of financial pressure but brought my final project to its full potential rather than accepting what I could fund myself. I cannot thank Tom Fund enough for their generosity and their help bringing this project to life.
Aarushi Matiyani
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. Beyond acting as an archive, I am performing a protest that can be unfurled at various heights, and is fully foldable. The protest is collaborative, conversational and can be performed in a group.
The Tom Fund enabled me to secure the large amount of textile that I required to bring this project to life. The scale of this textile being bigger than a person was an integral part of its design, to emphasise the overwhelming amount of data on internet shutdowns. The Fund also pushed me to envision and plan out the future of this protest, beyond Goldsmiths. 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.