Goldsmiths - University of London

Project description: Nigeria is a secular state, at least on the surface; but recent rise in religious fundamentalism in both Islam and Christianity has altered the geo-political  landscape of the country. One obvious consequence of this development, which is widely reported, is the spate of intercommunal violence; but perhaps more far-reaching is the threat to democratic secularism and its ideals of Freedom, Rights, Equality and the entire idea of modernity and progress. The question is, what is responsible for this phenomenon and where would this lead or where would it end? Would Nigeria split along religious lines, as in Sudan? Would a theocratic state or states emerge as a consequence or can Nigeria survive as a unitary state amidst these crises?  Or is religion a smokescreen for a political discourse and action dating back to the colonial project? These are some of the questions and themes which this research aims to explore.

see www.loscasagrande.org for more details

Project description: My thesis aims at reviving the notion of emancipation as a notion for radical philosophy in order to counteract the poststructural impetus of condemning such an endeavour as impossible, through examining  and contextualizing two contrasting schools of contemporary critical thought: French Post-Marxism with Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Etienne Balibar and German Critical Theory with Axel Honneth and Alex Demirović. It aims at critically analysing their respective concepts of emancipation that - especially the thinkers on the French side -  seem to have gained strong attention since the beginning of the new century. The specific composition of thinkers should allow for a rigorous critique of both sides as well as to a mutual enrichment. To put French Post-Marxism and German Critical Theory into such a dialogue ultimately leads to the question of the foundations of critical thought and its relation to society. Finally, this thesis should lead to a re-thought notion of emancipation that takes the current conjuncture of late-capitalism and thus, the necessary economic  dimension of such a notion seriously and yet, remains  faithful to the possibility of not only critiquing but also opening up ways to potentially overcome the contemporary forms of domination we live in.

Project description: This project will examine the market for second-hand goods by mapping the ways in which they are sifted and selected, and how they become recognised and accepted as 'vintage'. A second dimension of the research will also look at how time and un-uttered longing or nostalgia tie into participation in these markets; and what personal, cultural and social values can be gleaned through our personal representations of a past we may not have lived through.

Project description: This dissertation explores how desire interlinks organic spheres, engaging both human and non-human organisms. Ecocide disturbs both the human and the natural ecosystems impulse by human greed and power.  This study aims to demostrate how breaking the binaries between culture and nature resurface women's agency.The principle objective is to examine the effects of ecocide and domestic terrorism mediated mainly but not only through film narratives.

Project description: Research on co-evolutionary theories of financial markets as complex socio-technical systems.

Project description: The project presents an attempt to open up new possibilities for the aesthetics of computational digital media. In this thesis, the aesthetic investigation of computation is understood as an ontological question about the relation between abstract entities and abstract processes on the one hand and experience on the other. The issues that then arise involve looking at both the formal and factual dimensions of computation, so as to unfold their mutuality.

Project description: My research critically examines current approaches to search interaction, open and big data and decision-support-systems in the area of (online) healthcare information interaction. It will explore how such interactions can be productively redesigned from a distributed cognition and extended mind theory perspective

Project description: Work inquire data communication systems, flat hierarchy concepts and alternative routing technologies. The research is foreseen to end up with an artificial life system model, which could be used for both artistic and scientific purposes.

Project description: A practice based investigation into American diner waitresses relationship to the iconography associated with their labour.  My research raises issues surrounding affective, emotional and precarious labour while I work as a diner waitress in New Jersey.  Through an audio/video and performance based installation I (re)produce the service experience raising the question how is the iconography used for the exploitation of waitress' labour and how could it be turned on it's head?

Project description: The research investigates concepts and constructions that illustrate alternative forms of comprehending “Latin America”. Albeit not focused on the idea of culture, but on a possible “conceptual aesthetics”, the idea is to collaborate with an understanding that is, at the same time political and expressive, in a formulation that intends to offer a new contribution for the notion of decolonization

Project description: Engaging a discussion between Rem Koolhaas and Bruno Latour, this thesis seeks to understand the critical shift that occurred in contemporary modes of urban organisation, emphasising on the correspondence between infrastructural and informational urban aspects. Focusing onEurope, it aims at entertaining the idea that this relation is not simply chaotic but is also productive of generic forms that are essential to engage with topological nature of contemporary urban space.

Project description: My research focuses on a compilation of short-stories constructed in a series of children’s workshops titled ‘The Great Book of the City Written by the Little Ones’, which present a unique, profound but barely explored urban portrayal of the intricate relationship between children and the urban environment. Children’s particular point of view leads us to a better reading of their place in the urban society and their distinctive appropriation of urban space; furthermore, their narrations act as an alternative space where their urban deprived autonomy is mirrored and at the same time is eradicated.

Project description: The research is about the different motivations, purposes and intentions that can lead an artist to create copyleft, open source, or free art, as well as the compromises, misunderstanding and other forms of transformations that emerge from such a novel techno-legal framework.

Project description: A critical interrogation of the potentialities of unfettered distribution of data and the technological, commercial, and legal threats thereto. Also conducting case studies via the exploration of 'content fetters' such as copyright/copyleft and cinematic watermarking.

Project description: The purpose of the thesis is to look at the relationship between the precognitive self and aesthetics in order to develop an understanding of the relationship between brain and movement and brain and emotion through case studies in contemporary art.

Project description: School, that is to say: a suspension in time and space for the exploratory pursuit of leisurely, unproductive, useless activities; or, a surveilled Skinneresque edifice designed for the reproduction of predictable, predetermined patterns; or, an intersubjective motif binding disparate thinkers into one body. My intent is to trace a history of several flows and coagulations gone under its name, and to re-search for ways out of the current times of pedagogical consensus.

Project description: I am concerned with whether a politically responsible art is possible today, and determining what form that art would take. Throughout my research, I am discussing and analysing modes of art, from Abstract Expressionism through to rave music, which have cultivated or intimated the possibility of egalitarian space outside the domain of instrumental reason, and the manner in which they have gradually all been co-opted by the dominant discourse. Through doing so, I aim to point toward stratagems for future art forms to evade such neutering in the hope of constructing destabilisatory utopian spaces.

Project description: Examines the cultural evolution of myth using deceased singers Curtis and Cobain to examine notions of religion, memory and capitalism. See  http://www.joydevotion.com for more information

Project description: My research is focused on understanding the condition of vulnerability and its influence within responses resulting from both the threat and experience of wounding. If vulnerability was perceived not as a condition to be resolved, but rather as a productive condition of human relations, how could this help to modify networks of power and provoke transformations in our relations with others? At this stage my research consists of examining vulnerability through several areas including notions of the friend and the enemy, the experience of suffering, and ideas of forgiveness. The works of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas are providing a framework for this research. I’m interested in how we might form alternative responses that result in mutual survival instead of perpetuating cycles of revenge and retribution.

Project description: Olga is experimenting with subtle modes of communication between humans and the Sun. Her research is practice led and consists on the development of interfaces that allow humans and nonhumans to tune into each other's rhythms. Currently she's developing a prototype to use solar activity (Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), solar flares, etc) to modulate the atmosphere of a room (air quality, light levels, sonic vibration, etc). See www.olgapanades.com for more information

Project description: This thesis interrogates the Korean Wave’s global popularity and circulation. Through this, key aspects of the Korean Wave phenomenon can be analysed, from its impact on the unusual ‘gift-exchange’ system to the ‘media-exchange’flows based on the interpretation of the 'global culture industry’(2007).

Project description: My project is to develop a theoretical and experiential response to materiality, dust and the fragment, via a written exploration of the artwork 'Break Down' (2001).  In this work the artist Michael Landy systematically catalogued, dismantled and granulated everything he owned. 'Break Down' can be seen as an articulation of modalities including the system, the fetish, fragmentation and biography.

Project description: This thesis is an exploration of the themes of law, justice and the city. Ancient Greek tragedy is used as a point of departure in this investigation, followed by various deployments and redeployments of these themes by theorists and philosophers.  The contested notions of justice and the political space of the polis also provide an access point to addressing contemporary issues - particularly geographical scale, asylum, and shelter.

Project description: My research explores how community workshops called 'fab labs' or 'hackspaces' can be understood as new designs of Being-in-the-world in meta-technical capitalism. Theorists I'm working with include Heidegger, Sloterdijk, Simondon, Papert and Illich.

Project description: The three central ambitions of this research are 1) to evaluate the relevance of Lacan’s late concept of the sinthome in light of his earlier work on ethics, 2) to bring this concept to bear on the relationship between ethics and recent visual art practice, and 3) to consider the changing ethical status of artworks in the wake of the contemporary ‘prohibition on prohibition’.

Project description: This project explores queer public cultures and public conveyances and receptions of queerness via 'queer mask formation'; placing special focus on cultural analysis of cultural/public figures from a wide variety of areas, and posing implications upon the queer mask within larger ideas about the body, the state, and the potentiality of disruptive queer affect.

Project description: My research examines representational strategies in academic, activist and charitable work on the subject of immigration detention in the UK. I use a variety of analytical strategies, combining interviews and participant observation in ngos and activist groups with textual analysis of literary and visual representations of the bodies of immigration detainees.

Project description: The research traces the development and critical analyzes heritage preservation policies and practices, vis-a-vis the dialogical relationship of urban re-development in Hong Kong, Singapore and Penang. The research also asks the question that what postcolonial heritage preservation should be and how a critical heritage preservation could contribute to decolonization.

Project description: This is a study of the microdynamics of research in computational physics. The thesis is based on an ethnographic study of the development and use of simulations in a large scientific research group. I develop a theory of technical practice to account for the rationality inherent in skilled computer-work, as well as the multitude of representations created, discarded or disseminated in the pursuit of the unknown. See: http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/MattSpencer for more information.

Project description: My current research looks into the relationship between creative practice, politics and philosophies of place, and draws on theories of topology and philosophical topography: the boundary, the limit, the site and the situation.

Project description: I'm interested in how borders work and where they are located. Instead of thinking only about their geographical placement, or only the singular and spectacular experiences of crossing geographical borders, I'm interested in thinking about how borders structure social life and how the violence that is the divisive work of borders is extended to a pervasive social condition.