The Migrant Archive
(ongoing)
The Migrant Archive is an examination of Britain’s attitudes towards it’s imperial history. Centrally it examines the ways that records of repressive actions in the colonies were systematically erased as part of the process of decolonisation. More broadly it examines the way that cultural conditioning in the United Kingdom has given rise to a profoundly distorted sense of the empire’s character and purpose, and links the consequences of these things to contemporary issues including long standing immigration policies, Brexit and the Windrush scandal.
The vast majority of the images we encounter each day are natively neither physical nor even visual, but are composed of various forms of hidden textual data. This has a wide range of implications, not least for the development and understanding of computer vision systems.
In collaboration with creative coder and generative artist Matt DesLauriers, we are developing a system which transforms recognisable photographs into new visual forms. These outputs appear highly abstract and at times even random, but contain essentially the same data as the source image, only re-rendered into new forms, largely unrecognisable and unintelligible to human visual cognition.
The outputs from this system are still, in a very literal sense, photographs, but in rendering them in this way we hope that human viewers will start to appreciate some of the ways that computer vision is very different from our own. In particular the way that these systems see images not as a series of symbolically significant visual elements adding up to sum greater than their parts, but as an impersonal aggregation of tonal, chromatic and spatial information.
Various self-published zines and other small publications.
Clicking on one of the zines will give more details.
Order zines and small publications
Trading Zones, St. Helier Old Police Station 19 – 29 September 2018
Trading Zones draws on work produced during my six months as the 2018 Archisle photographer in residence at the Société Jersiaise, time I have spent looking at the islands finance industry. Located in Royal Square’s Old Police Station, itself a former bank and later the location of the Jersey Police Financial Investigations Unit, the exhibition is a multi-method survey of Jersey’s most successful contemporary industry.
Using a wide range of photographic approaches, Trading Zones considers different aspects of finance, from its history and geography to its architecture and visual culture. Alongside this the exhibition reflects on the industry’s complex relationship with the island that supports it, highlighting aspects of Jersey’s past and present which have been conducive to the growth of finance, and inviting Jersey people to contribute their own thoughts about the industry and what in means to them as part of an evolving display.
Metropole A composite of dozens of walks through the city of London, using it’s changing architecture as metaphor for the city’s growing inequalities. Published by Overlapse 2018, designed by Tom Mrazauskas
Organisation (ongoing) For the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the early shopping arcades of Paris were the defining buildings of the nineteenth century, spaces where the technologies, mores, and concerns of the time coalesced within a single structure of iron and glass. If one were to look for a comparable space to represent the late twentieth and early twenty first century, a strong candidate would be the international airport. These are the spaces that most of us seek to spend as little time in as possible, and to spend that time as distracted as possible from the environment that surrounds us. And yet this space is one where so many of the defining features of our time unite under one roof, from global trade and mass migration, to environmental challenges to security concerns, the modern airport represents the complex, vulnerable, interconnectedness of the modern world. 
Trading Zones
(2018 – 2026)
Trading Zones is an ongoing project about international finance, with a particular focus on the relationship between the ‘on’ and ‘off’ shore. In the project this is crystalised in the relationship between the City of London, a medieval vestige turned financial centre in the heart of the Greater London, and the Bailiwick of Jersey, a semi-autonomous crown dependency turned financial centre in the English Channel, where I was also Archisle artist in residence for six months in 2018.
Trading Zones examines this relationship through a deep dive into the two jurisdiction’s entwined histories, institutions, cultures and practices, exploring how this particularly relational area of high capitalism has slowly evolved, by design and by accident, over the course of nearly a thousand years. Combining images with texts, documents and diagrams, Trading Zones offers a visual exploration which moves beyond superficial and clichéd depictions of financial centres, and towards one which aims to be as nuanced and complex as the subject deserves.
Trading Zones comprises:
= 500 digital photographs and composite photographs
= 88 diagrams of financial instruments, structures, agreements and organisations
= 7 essays amounting to 80,000 words total length
= Approximately 300 A4 pages of research materials
= Various items of ephemera related to finance
= 20 minute two screen video installation
= 700 page book dummy
Exploring the dark origins and moral grey zones of space exploration through the life of V-2 rocket designer turned NASA engineer Wernher von Braun.
20×25 cm, 250 pages
Hardback case binding
Edition of 800
Published by Disphotic Editions, 2023
ISBN 978-1-7392695-0-0
