About

I am an artist and Assistant Professor at Northumbria University with 20 years of working in a range of arts and education contexts. My research adopts a critical approach to digital technologies and environment, using a combination of practice-based, social science and fieldwork-based methods. I am part of the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group, Cosmotechnics artists group and since 2020 have produced interdisciplinary research with political ecologist Dr Pete Howson, Northumbria University.

My doctoral thesis In Silico: A practice-based exploration of computer simulations in art  explored the material and temporal relationships between computer generated and natural environments. I used philosophy from media materiality and assemblage theory alongside an art practice rooted in new media and contemporary art.

What are the material costs of digital image production? Since 2020 I have researched the relationship between data centres and the production of computer-generated images (CGI) via render farms – networked computer hardware systems for mass producing frames of animation and cinema. This started with The Cloud In the Sea (2020)- a simulated reconstruction of an experimental Microsoft data centre placed under the sea off the coast of the Orkney Isles, to keep the computer hardware at operating temperature. The following two years of fieldwork and interviews led to a photobook of data centre architecture entitled Colocation (2022), a journal article, exhibitions and a co-authored ethnographic film Tributary (2023).  As part of this research I interviewed companies that re-circulate heat from data centres to grow crops and beer in Amsterdam, and use datacentre infrastructure within apartment blocks to generate heating for Parisians. In Upstream Image (2022) I created an expanded simulation, in which the playback of a 3D-modelled Icelandic data centre site generated enough heat to grow basil seeds in a customised greenhouse.

In 2023 I was commissioned by Colab Sunderland and South Tyneside Council to produce a new work in response to two new energy projects that use water from the River Tyne and an abandoned mine to heat nearby homes.

I am currently working on a project that explores the impact of NewSpace technologies on the environment and global indigenous communities. This is a continuation of thinking through the impacts and underlying ideologies of the hyper capitalist technology sector on the people and places of the Global South. I am interested in using forms of assemblage theory and Yuk Hui’s Cosmotechnics project to understand how technology might be constituted in more sustainable, harmonic and socially beneficial ways.

My work prompts questions about the sustainability of contemporary digital culture whilst also pointing towards the messy ways in which digital processes are entangled within human, non-human, material and virtual networks.