Things That Help Me Understand: Research Through Design and Artistic Research in my Process (Research Seminar)

In this seminar, I will be presenting a few of the interactive artefacts I have been producing before and during my PhD as ways for me to reify and understand my own relationship with technology as it changes over time. Each piece has emerged from a duality of practical experimenting with new hardwares and softwares, while also absorbing and reflecting on the socio-technical relationships around me. Often the underlying concerns that they reflect don’t emerge until I have spent some time interacting with them and/or observed someone else using them. In this way I struggle with describing them as artworks and see myself rather as an assembler of things and concepts. Someone who tries to present the artificial in different ways as a tactic to get glimpses of what technology really is. Three of the pieces that I will be taking a look at are: 64 Things To Worry About (2011-2017): A heat-map of the world’s concerns which is designed to replace the need for people to engage with an increasingly alarmist and attention-driven online media ecosystem - both legacy and fringe. The Conspiracy Capitaliser (2020-2023): An interactive interface which allows users to generate their own conspiracy theories as a means to advertise products and politics. Front End Assembly (2024): An in-progress interactive piece which presents itself in layers. First as a classic interactive mirror, next as a piece of self-critical AI technology, and finally as a device for harvesting data which tries to suggest the feeling of entanglement with unknown algorithmic systems. I would like to talk about how these pieces might communicate the concerns we all share about technology, in what situations they would work best (exhibition/gallery), how they might bring designers and publics together in a shared space, and how these explorations can integrate into a thesis.