REMOTE VISION EXPERIMENTS: A PHOTO ROMAN

This work considers the ways in which, throughout human history, maps have defined our limits as much as charted our exploration. These images act as a kind of ghost vision – a spectral overlay of the world created and accessed as data sets, satellite imagery, and geopolitical mapping, merged in an algorithmically generated 3D mesh. This brings with it a view of the world in which complementary and competing navigational vectors collage and collide. Yet, for all its apparent hyper-modern otherness, its novelty and dexterity is still oriented around and contingent upon the temporal and electromagnetic limits of our biological inheritance

New rendezvous street: An archeology of the future

In the UK House Interactive Zone, the RCA premiered New Rendezvous Street: An archaeology of the future built in real-time throughout the festival by RCA Senior Tutor Luke Pendrell with students Claire Breach, Xanthe E.Horner and Wenhui Jiang. This immersive environment acted as a portal to virtual showcases featuring work of staff and students from across the School of Communication. As the project evolved, it expanded to include an immersive version of the UK House venue that collaged scans of the architecture and guests with audio and video footage

What was once proven can now only be imagined: Overall I am satisfied

In this paper I argue that the Art School, in its various incarnations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, was, not just a site of personal transformation but of radical societal change. Offering crucibles of experimentation and radical visions of what the world could be, and might be constructed, in spaces in which it was possible to “desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future”[1] Such places if not already gone are under pressure. Out of step with a culture in which as Wendy Brown notes “social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation.”[2] An education culture of league tables, excellence frameworks of personal entrepreneurial ‘success’ and ‘student satisfaction’ In this paralysis of the cultural imaginary it has been recently argued that, “the future has been cancelled.”[3] Can a reconfigured “Art school” side step nostalgia and be utilised in the conception of radical new structures? By taking Ranciere’s conception of a “critical art” to “produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation.” How can we re-engineer the future in the neoliberal value system? The solution seems obvious: In order to reengineer the future we must first reimagine it. [1] Walter Gropius “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program” 1919 [2] Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution - Zone Books [3] #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek, 14 May 201

Hard Wired Hegemony

The Art & Design School was, in its various incarnations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not just a site of personal transformation but also a powerful engine capable of fomenting radical collective and societal change

Doggerland

In this project, Ben Branagan, Luke Pendrell and Eva Verhoeven have banded together to create this booklet that dissects a collection of damaged and questionable artefacts around this disappearing land and suggests the possibility of spaces both real and metaphoric. The clean layout and minimal text allows room for these examinations to really sink in and be considered by the viewer. This booklet is the first in a series of three

Speculative Aesthetics

This series of interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics ranges from contemporary art’s relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design. From varied perspectives of philosophy, art and design, participants examine the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists, and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and traction of images in the world today, experimentally employing techniques of modelling, formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously engineer new domains of experience and map them through a reconfigured aesthetics that is inseparable from its sociotechnical conditions

Roadside picnic

An outcome of Unreal Communication, a research project in RCA's School of Communication. “A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.” Taken from the science fiction novel of the same name, Roadside Picnic draws on the book’s notion of ‘the zone’, a restricted area contaminated with unearthly technology. A place where psychic and physical anomalies challenge our understanding of time and space, populated with hallucinatory phantoms, strange and dangerous phenomena and littered with artefacts manifesting inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties. Places and things not fully understood. Similarly, the places, objects and agencies that appear in the show feel at times like chance discoveries, finds or excavations. More fragments of another time and space than creations or artworks from this. Over a period of four months students and staff from across the RCA’s School of Communication have begun to explore the vast creative possibilities and complexities offered by Unreal Engine, advanced imaging software developed by Epic to create interactive, real-time 3D and Cinematic work. The exhibition features work in progress from Unreal Communication, a research project within the Royal College of Art's School of Communication. Participating in Unreal Communication are: Claire Breach, Savyna Darby, Udit Datta, Tianwen Dong, Krishnan Ghosh K, Xanthe Horner, Shan Huang, Yueh Huang, Anupama S Iyer, Amir B Jahanbin, Wenhui Jiang, Halim Lais, Matt Lewis, Luke Pendrell, Ke Peng, Kam Raoofi, Aiden Shabka, Shyama V S, Joseph Whitmore, Yiru Yan, Weihang Zhu, and Shahwali Shayan Supported by Epic Games' MegaGrant Programme