Loves Pictures immersive haze virtual pavilion breathTAKING watching immaterial spaces apps Street Story Xr-H matterBot airTime moving image thomas highflyer in place of silence of the sea untitled photography photoworks biennial fashion cities africa unknown portrait student life student pelham museum publications space cowgirl carnival children jubliee sports marathon
home
Artist, Senior Lecturer Games Art & Design, frontend developer, specialising in playful mobile, immersive games in immersive real-world spaces. My work includes augmented reality, virtual reality, photography, moving image, and data analytics for knowledge-based storytelling connecting archives, people and place, for social change. Guest speaker: FACT// University of Sussex, Heritage Network Brighton and Hove, Brighton Digital Festival, Beyond Conference, Digital Inequalities University of Brighton, School of History, Art History & Philosophy University of Sussex, in subjects related to digital humanities, digital geographies, and digital memory practices. Exhibited: Jubilee Library, Lighthouse, Brighton Digital Festival, Phoenix Brighton, Brighton Photo Biennial, Brighton Photo Fringe, Fashion Cities Africa, Dorset Place Gallery, Onca Gallery. Published: Digital Democracies, The Royal Pavilion & Museums, Fashion Cities Africa: Look book, Black History and Argus Newspaper. Commissions: Seas Brighton, MSL Hastings, Southdown Housing, Photoworks, The Royal Pavilion & Museums, News and Community Organisations. Workshops: Widening Participation, National Citizens Service. Funding: Innovate UK, Exhale Grant Brighton & Hove Council, ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) University of Sussex
Judith Photoworks Biennial Fashion Cities Africa Jubilee Printmaker book 3va over 60's Dance Group Carnival Hair Elite North Miao
Immersive
Haze short trailer
haze
Haze is a virtual space, illustrated here in moving image format curated from visual and audio social media data of the Black Lives Matter protests from June 2020. The virtual exhibition serves as an archive that explores systemic racism in law enforcement, highlights protests in both the USA and UK, and addresses issues related to historical narratives and commemoration in public spaces across the UK. Focusing on law enforcement's violence against Black people, exemplified by George Floyd's murder on 25 May 2020, RIP. Haze in this context serves as a metaphor for obfuscation, a visual obstacle representing systemic racism embedded in our daily lives. This haze prevents us from fully perceiving the entrenched structures creating interference in the game called progress; now the haze is so normalised we have forgotten it is there. Its violent clearing on 25 May 2020 marked an unwelcome reminder of the considerable distance to be navigated towards equality and social change as new norms. Curated media includes: 360 degree video, photographs, audio, gifs, moving image **Trigger Warning**

This video contains non-graphic images of people who were killed during racist acts, and may be distressing. Flashing images occur at 7.30 minutes. Please proceed with caution.

* For Immersive Proposal start video at 0.54 seconds
Full Screen recording of 3D VR space
external view of the haze pavilion view of the haze pavilion view of the haze pavilion view of the haze pavilion
Virtual Pavilion
Virtual space exhibiting AirTime - a mobile based augmented reality designed to be viewed in the urban space. The design of virtual pavilion is influenced Modernist architect Mies Van Der Rohe's German national pavilion or as it became known the 'Barcelona Pavilion' built in 1929. The original building, intended as international exhibition space was dismantled some months after its completion. It was some 50 years later in 1983 that a group of Catalan architects resurrected the building from photographs and drawings in tribute to the original building which by then had become legendary. This practice is centred on the forensic reconstruction and reinterpretation of the past, into the future archives. The Barcelona Pavilion was the basis for the Virtual Pavilion for reasons of its own history and reconstruction, together with its semi-permeable nature allowing the outside into the interior space. These are both the perfect metaphors for the making of this playful space, purposed for collaborating, prototyping and for allowing new narratives into the archives. This pavilion was designed as a playful venue for meeting and collaborating to develop and prototype new work and ideas for prototyping,talks and exhibition during work-in-progress to final presentation. To see the work in virtual reality, please contact me for the link.
Virtual Pavilion
breathTAKING
breathTAKING [ page under construction ]
watching 360 image watching 360 image watching 3600 image breathTAKING posters Phoenix Gallery
watching
surveillance, bias, control Media: Processing using computer vision with facial detection, motion detection and data visualisation. The methodology in making this work was very much an experimental exploration into those situated ideologies, technologies, and the aesthetics of the body, in relation to networked city and its data. This thinking in combination was designed to tell a story of the proliferation of machines that see in the built environment. These machines use facial recognition, and/or facial detection to read our faces in order to reveal information to us, or conceal information from us. Here the mechanisms of secrecy's duality are in play. In the built environment we are neither overtly privy to the extrinsic operation of looking and the reading of faces, or its intrinsic mechanisms of data transfer. These remain to all intents and proposes unseen and undetected to the human eye. As counter to this play, in this work the machine needs your face in order to tell the story but also uses motion detection as indicator of the shifting role of your body in the vicinity of that machine, as it reads your face. Motion detection is secrecy's orator; its role in place of explicit information is to inform you that something to be aware of is taking place. Simultaneously however and unbeknown to you, your role in the narrative is in continuous flux, oscillating non-consensually between spectator and performer as it reads 'you' and transfers information about you, at 30 times a second around the city.
video demonstration of interactive facial and motion detection
Immaterial
Immaterial Spaces Immersive storytelling featuring two works playful works using computer vision. Immateriality is defined here in two senses, the first is described by (Benoist: Hide) as referring to different kinds of continuity and exchange between the body and society, this is interpreted here as an intersectionality which relates to the distribution or not, of power and knowledge. The second useful definition of immateriality; refers to the nature of the landscape; both as material built environment of the City, and of its immateriality that is, of its archival data relating to the making of that City. In this landscape the material and immaterial form patterns and interdependencies arranging the spaces of historic narrative, spatial appearances for the absence of certain bodies from view. "What is known must be made present by an awareness of its absence" Nooter, Abimbola This work is intended as a site specific immersive installation designed to know the unnamed people who lived a life of enslavement, associated with Brighton. Watch this installation video in fullscreen here
immaterial spaces installation
Apps
I explore cultural heritage through the archive using human-computer interaction as a tool for participatory engagement. Designed to increase availability, engagement, agency, education and digital inclusion the digital artefacts are use in the process of creative placemaking in community level. The purposed being to create a shift in communities from passive consumers towards developing tools using emerging technologies as critical users, creators and producers in a creative feedback loop in their own voice.
Haze short trailer
Street Quest
Street Quest
Exhibition Exhibition Exhibition
Street Story
Street Story, a mobile augmented reality app and posters, generated significant buzz in Brighton & Hove by bringing the often-overlooked narratives of the transatlantic slave trade to the forefront in the city. With an estimated 6,800 engagements during its launch period—through media coverage, high-traffic exhibition at Jubilee Library and direct engagement with the app, the project successfully delivered accessible knowledge-based stories that encouraged audiences to walk, explore, interact and discover using their phones. Using participatory community engagement techniques to enhance a sustainable sense of belonging, we collaborated with local schools to involve underrepresented young people in the process of making 2D assets and storytelling for the experience. Partnering with the Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton, supported the project’s research activities, adding impact through publicising and dissemination Street Story within national and internationally member networks. The project’s innovation has attracted interest from museums and educators, in the fields of Computer Science, History, PSHE and Geography, highlighting its impactful appeal and significant potential for further development.
App Landing page App About page - explainer video Map User Interface Explainer Video - Play Play testing Participatory Poster Making Exhibition Poster - Antigua Exhibition Poster - Trinidad Exhibition Poster - Guyana Social Media outreach - from posters Social Media outreach - form posters Participation certificate ceremony Participation certificate Exhibition Exhibition Exhibition
Xr-H
The Xr-h (extended reality histories) app is a playful and disruptive digital artefact that challenges and reshapes the boundaries of how people think about and negotiate Blackness in both urban and virtual spaces. It aims to encourage discussions about histories and its connections to the Brighton region, exploring the beliefs, values, and assumptions that underpin them. Xr-h is built on a archival dataset, extended with site surveys to gather photographs and stories for the augmented reality feature. The user experience design takes a mobile-first approach for accessibility, while the user interface design reflects heritage brand values through colour, typography, heraldic symbolism. Programmed by me this bespoke app was used during creative placemaking workshops along with DALL.E AI image generation software to capture new stories about place. Exhibition photographs courtesy of University of Sussex.
Exhibition Exhibition Exhibition Home - App Screen About About - expanded accordion map - pins location Augmented reality Participant Image Gallery contact
airTime
airTime was a site-specific work using encoded visual markers as sensors in the geo-tagged location of America Ground in Hastings to tell an unfolding story from data. See map. The story is told, firstly in the vicinity of America Ground where markers are designed to reveal immediate parts of a narrative of between 1 - 2 minutes on mixed media, using Augmented Reality. This content is accessed via audiences' mobile device in browser without the need for them to download an app, with connection to the site made via short links or QR code, in the main barcode incorporated in posters, then distributed in the space. Secondly, the placement of markers at intersecting points on the map leads us through map coordinates and time, to other places in the urban space, where concealed in the bungaroosh are other unremembered stories, yet to be told. To see the work in browser or on Android mobile here
AirTime AirTime Map Lost unremembered storyteller realign place taken play poster
matterBot
*Work in progressMatterBot is a curated selection of social media and research data, it is a bespoke interactive work in the chatbot aesthetic designed to create meaningful real-world conversations and actions for positive social. This work seeks to contextualise the preceding centuries which lead to the death of George Floyd Monday 25th May 2020. Following this, the work touches on the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and culminates in a call-to-action for the user in the form of subject related hashtags. This project subverts the conversational systems from its usual contemporary use, by global commercial brands using chatbots for consumer digital marketing to sell products in a light non-probing way; towards a democratic (feminist) application of the chatbot for the dissemination of information to empower individuals and to promote positive social change or wellbeing such as AI chatbot rAInbow that is trying to turn this tide of sexual violence against women in South Africa or the Walk with Yeshi bot a narrative bot designed to humanise the global water crisis from the perspective of an Ethiopian. MatterBot sits in this aesthetic; a narrative tool designed to pose the difficult questions and scenarios which have been asked many times before, but perhaps the first time they will be heard.
matterBot A restrictive practice.
movingImage
moving image text
Haze short trailer
Thomas highflyer
Thomas Highflyer along with two other boys was rescued from a slave Dhow in 1866 by Captain Thomas Paisley of the Royal Navy's East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadron. Tom was about 8 or 9 years old when rescued. This film charts the journey of how an African boy rescued from a slave ship in the region of Zanzibar in East Africa's came to be buried in a graveyard in Brighton in 1870, spoken and written word in English and Swahili “Captain TMS Pasley of the HMS Highflyer captured slave dhow for which prize money is about to be distributed and three African boys all were found on board the dhow have been brought to England and will, we hear, be well cared for by some of the officers. They had become great favourite on board and had been named respectively Tom Highflyer, Sam Oldfield, and Bob Dhow.” The London Standard, Tuesday 1st September 1868 Screenings 2019 screened Thomas Highflyer, Lighthouse 2018 screened Thomas Highflyer, Royal Pavilion Museum To see the work on Vimeo click here – please contact me for password
son of an African, unknown
in place of silence
Chapter II - Documenting the making of Brighton in relation to the City's involvement with the Transatlantic Slave trade. This work is a creaive data visualisation in moving image format, designed to be viewed in immersive spaces. It's British historic point of origin at the Court of Elizabeth I, sees Brighton, West / East Africa, and the African Caribbean connected through time and place It is these latent traces of the past which finds itself secreted just under the surface of the city's history today. This work sets out to examine the silence of that history and to make a place in the archive for new voices. Spoken word Yorùbá (African people of south-western Nigeria and Benin) with English subtitles. Screenings: 2021 Brighton and Hove Council Staff, Black History Month event 2017 screened in place of silence, Edward Street 2017 screened of the sea, Phoenix Gallery To see the work on Vimeo click here please contact me for password
in place of silence, 2017
Of the sea
Chapter I - This narrative of Brighton is counter to the conventional story of Brighton related to Kings and Princes and of the healing qualities of the sea. This is a story told through the lens of the historic pursuits on the high seas, of resources and contested sovereignties which gave rise to the building of Georgian England financed in part, by the largest enforced migration in history. On walking Brighton's coastal reach, there is opportunity to contemplate the nature of Brighton's involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade. This work is designed to be viewed in immersive spaces. It is British, historic point of origin, at the Court of Elizabeth I, sees Brighton, West / East Africa, and the African Caribbean connected through time and place. It is these latent traces of the past which finds itself secreted, just under the surface of the city's history today. This work sets out to examine the silence of that history and to make a place in the archive for a new voice. To see the work on Vimeo click here please contact me for password
of the sea, 2016
Untitled
This film is concerned with the peripheral vision of being in one place and of viewing another. Its figures interact with the voids of a closed landscape from a singular vantage point, restricted by certain angles, certain perspectives, certain data; what remains are the fragmented glimpses of an original concept distorted by movement. The site is engulfed by the white noise of fixed reason whilst putrefied issues loiter on the wind. Screened 2016 screened untitled, Edward Street Gallery Moving image and data Duration: 3.05 minutes works available on Vimeo here
Untitled, 2015
Photography
2018 Exhibition Immaterial spaces I, Royal Pavilion & Museum 2016 Exhibition Selected: Brighton Photo Biennial #bpb16 2016 Exhibition Selected: Brighton Photo Fringe #bpf16 2016 Exhibition Fashion Cities Africa: Royal Pavilion Museum 2016 Exhibition Experimental Archaeology: UOB Gallery 2015 Exhibition Inner Landscape: Onca Gallery Brighton 2015 Exhibition Son of Canaan: Pelham Street 2015 Internship Social Enterprise, London Archival photography, Royal Pavilion Museum
Onca Gallery Durvis Photoworks: Our City: How do we Look? Printmaker Fashion Cities Africa Fashion Cities Africa Jubilee Book: Hair Carnival
Photoworks Biennial
Performing Identity; The Politics of Diversity, and the City: June 23rd 2016, a defining moment in British history is marked on the political geography of the City of Brighton. The British referendum (Brexit) was the way in which the British vote found a way to articulate the anxieties of the unheard voices situated outside Westminster's political centre. In that moment the invisible aberration of national differences between people was brought into plain sight. “When the history moment is right, the unconscious speaks its own mind” To All Appearances, Herbert Blau. Nationhood is a still image, in constant motion asserting itself through the palpable discomfort of the residents of this City. This project sets out to examine the performative nature of identity both as it augments and, redefines itself in the context of this political moment. See the exhibition installation in Jubilee Square here
Photoworks: Our City: How do we Look?
Fashion Cities Africa
The Fashion Cities Africa exhibition provided a snapshot of the diverse fashion landscape of four African cities: Casablanca, Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Brighton. To complement the exhibition the 'Look Book' documents African fashion practices in the City of Brighton & Hove. Brighton Museum & Art Gallery hosted two open call fashion shoots which invited people for the African diaspora with a 'passion for fashion' to come along and take part. The first shoot took place in the museum the second in a chosen location around the city featured here are a selection of images published in the book. The culmination of this project was a perfect combination of people contextualised by place in relation to their contemporary identity... Read more about the exhibition: Brighton Museum Blog: Fashion Cities Africa Phase I here Brighton Museum Blog: Fashion Cities Africa Phase II here
Look Book Look Book Durvis Innocente Rachel Colin Fashion Cities Africa Thomas Anthony Fashion Cities Africa Magnus Jody
Unknown Portrait
A film based project designed to document trades which are in their revival or their demise
Carpenter Cobbler Dismantler Butcher Printmaker
Student Life
A studio-based project designed to illustrate the anxieties of student life
Student Life Student Life Student Life Student Life Student Life
Student
Part of an ongoing project which illustrates the variety of courses student take.
Hello
Pelham
This project was designed in response to a particular moment in the life of a building – Pelham Tower, a moment in which political, ideological and financial views collide. The high rise nature of the building stands as a metaphor for the separation between the debated ideas and views. Buildings routinely represent a kind of constancy, a monolith in the landscape and although they are adapted and changed over time this generally occurs in indeterminable increments, this is partly why the current catastrophical change is so keenly felt. As the building raises floor by floor its physicality mirrors and reinforces the hierarchical nature of its organisation. Each floor offers solace to its communities at a structural and individual level but then silos them in relation to the whole. The project title proposes outcomes for the building, firstly ‘Pelham’, refers to a tangible building as container for memory, locatable in the real world. 'TQ 31317 04902' refers to a building of the past, an intangible which is only locatable in the virtual world by its coordinates on the earth, identity and memory are dispersed and now resides in myth.
Plant Hair Beauty Staff Lecture Room Lecture Hall Boardroom Basement
museum
Archive quality photographs commissioned by the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. These were from the textiles and objects collection of the Miao people of Guangdong Province, Southwest China.
comb Coat Bracelet Hair Pin Necklace Necklace
Publications
.
Carnival Jubilee Hair Elite
Space cowgirl
The embodied ‘raced’ self, transposed into online space as avatar carries with it interminable questions related to the nuances of identity, representation and Blackness. So much so, that the weight of questions burdens both the inner critical reasoning inherent in the process of making work and the outer facade of the creation itself. Any notion of lightness, joy of creativity in the process of making can be crushed or lost, by the over positionality which takes place in order to create. This piece describes the process of critical thinking and considerations followed by the process of making my first 3d avatar for virtual pavilion a virtual reality gallery containing Afrofuturist work, visited by a spaceman. Mediated images of Blackness are powerful agents, carrying with them historical constructs which can subsequently influence a range of judgments from social to historical ideologies, to personhood on the body. Avatars are designed to take the place of our embodied selves in online spaces becoming our virtual identities in interactive games, social media spaces and more recently in online work environments. This is a weighty contextual and ethical responsibility, at a granular level we can decide what we want to look like and in so doing, how we want to be perceived. As our true likeness? As an adopted persona? Or something in between... Read the full commissioned article by Digital Democracies here
Space Cow Girl
Carnival
Press work commissioned for publication.
Carnival Carnival Carnival Carnival Carnival Carnival Carnival
Children
Work commissioned for the publication Positive HAIRitage book.
Book: Hair Children Hair book Hair Children Hair book book Children Hair book Children Hair book Children Hair book Children Hair book Children Hair book Children Hair book Children Hair book Children Hair book
Jubilee
Press work commissioned during the Queens Jubilee for publication in the Argus Newspaper, Brighton.
Jubilee Jubilee Front Page Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee Jubilee
Sports
Kopano FC Part of the History of Black Footballers "Kopano FC was formed in June 2007 by Wayne James, to form a team which would reflect the ethos of harmony and celebrating difference. Our most obvious similarity is our united love for football hence the name Kopano (Botwana translation for United). In two seasons we have trained with in excess of 90 footballers. Our third season will see us place four members of the squad through their FA LEVEL 1 in Coaching football in preparation for the expansion of the Club into further two teams. We have also completed a number of Community Events in Sussex and will be looking to carry this work into an International platform in the near future. We have an open door policy our only requirement is integrity and commitment" Wayne James
Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC Kapano FC
Marathon
Press work commissioned during the Brighton Marathon of the elite runners for publication.
elite runners elite runners Winner Brighton Mathon elite runners Winner Brighton Marathon Elite Winner Brighton Marathon Brighton Marathon Brighton Marathon Brighton Marathon Brighton Marathon Brighton Marathon