TF/18-19
Projects supported in 2018-19.
Lily McCraith
In order to understand politics, we need to embody them. The Pre-enactors Guild is a performative research body, investigating pre-enactments and their role as tools for rehearsing the politics of speculation. Pre-enactment is the rehearsal of something which has not yet happened. The Guild seeks to test new definitions of pre-enactment and allow anybody to pre-enact!
The Pre-enactors Guild has been gathering predictions from a famous TV psychic, a stock broker, a local resident and an Engineer to script and rehearse the politics of a contested site. The Guild has also built a Giant and written about pre-enactment in 'The Pre-enactors Almanac'.
With the Tom Fund I was able to speak to international television psychic medium, Craig Hamilton Parker. I had a telephone reading with him, which allowed me to have an in depth conversation with him and the predictions he made were used to form part of the script I generated, as well as using the transcription in my research publication.
Lucy Faherty
Underfoot is an exploration into scales of human impact on the world, using the pavement as the site for this investigation. The pavement is often misinterpreted as a surface of the world rather than a surface on the world. This project explores the pavement and its history on all scales; from the building of the pavements, to the immediate histories of yesterday; the litter, the pebbles and the dirt. The project aims to uncover both how the we impact the pavement but also how it impacts us.
Wanting to understand the pavement on all of these scales, the project was limited by the unknowability of the contents of the dirt. The Tom Fund allowed me to overcome this by funding the scientific analysis of the dirt from pavements in New Cross and a rural street in Bredhurst. The analysis revealed that the dirt of both areas had a significant artificial contents of glass, plastic and petroleum hydrocarbons. This information became the forefront of my project as I went on to create Rammed dirt cubes, which explored reasoning for differences between the dirt of different streets. Without the help of the Tom Fund my work could not have reached this outcome.
Artemis Vergou
When you see Kim Kardashian do you think of feminism? If you wear make-up, do you feel empowered? If you use a dog filter, can you bark? For my end of year project I produced a short film that aims to explore the ridiculousness of the online celebrity feminist persona. I attempt to question the instagram behaviours of normality, by making public behaviours and personas that hide behind a screen. Is it weird? Is it normal? Is it candid? Or is it all a bit of fun?
Make-up, Instagram, working-out, dieting, reality TV and nostalgia fashion tumble into a hyper-millennial, feel-good space. How is feminism exchanged and performed in the age of Instagram aesthetics, inflatable bodies and the ever-mounting pressure to be liked? Has Instagram created a generation of empowered women or has it drowned us in contouring?
The awarded Tom Fund helped me take my project down a more professional route: I cast professional adult and child actors for my film, I secured a wardrobe and props that served my brief and worked with other film professionals. Without the Tom Fund my project would not have been possible to complete.
Matilda Engelmark
Borders and boundaries dictate our physical world. The City of London is a bottled up view of archaism, devoted to ceremonially rebuilding and restoring old walls. Herein, the performance has begun.
Focusing on the London Wall as the object of my affection and affliction, I have been mapping the City of London’s forgotten spaces and in turn, attempting to use them. The project has extended beyond the London Wall to explore borders and territories, and my own anxiety and fear towards Brexit, using storytelling as a method of building fiction and as action. The notion of building a wall seems topical, with dark objects like barbed wire appearing at many European borders. Within this, I have begun to weave. 4km by 10m. Threading the needle, cutting the yarn, slowly conjuring the Wall back into the City, in the hopes that this performative act can push discussion on how we talk about borders.
The fund has helped me begin this journey, allowing me to complete the first 50cm by 10m section of the London Wall. Without this, the physical reality of building the Wall would be nonexistent, and my project would remain un-tangible, left in mysticism and myth.
Donia Aur Jones
`Things I’ve made for you´ questions the impact of agriculture within the influence of design. My role within the project as a designer is utilising the connection between both practices of design and farming - how one influences the other, how both are needed for innovation within the rural community of Tregaron.
Farmers are designers. Contemporary farming and contemporary design are ever-emerging, both practices are always current and never fixed and by challenging the roles of farmers as the performance of practical theory and designing through farming will allow a space for new innovations. The project investigates whether farmers can potentially transfer their skills to a design context in order to create objects for the woollen industry in the rural community of Tregaron was (my hometown).
The Tom Fund support has provided me with various materials to create tools / objects / mechanisms. It has also allowed me to engage with the community of farmers in Tregaron, transferring and combining design and farming skills - a process which has not only developed the project, but my practice as a designer.
Elvire Borrione
‘Grow’ is a sequence of workshops designed for Lewisham locals to discuss and act upon issues related to our food system. The workshops use the growth of plants as a tool to emphasize the need for a collective force. This will change things by promoting sharing between communities which will reintegrate biodiversity in our cities. The changes to be done reside in the relations between men and the rest of the natural world. I want my project to design a framework for social innovations, empowering people to take action. I believe that a greater relationship with nature’s resources, from childhood and throughout our lives, will contribute to the development of another image of the world. These representations, ultimately, can be represented in societal choices.
My name is Elvire Borrione, I’m a designer, born in Paris (1997) and based in London – studying Design at Goldsmiths University (2019). I am deeply interested in processes of design that challenge us to question the socio-political status quo, the conventional ideas of inhabiting cities and sharing space. The Tom fund allowed me to organize a dinner for 8 people in a private gallery space in Peckham. This dinner provided me the opportunity to meet and speak with relevant people within the agriculture field and the local area. It allowed me to conduct field research in a more meaningful way than just traditionally interviewing actors. I also used this event to develop new ways to speak about and discuss the food industry with a strong impact. Collectively, while enjoying a nice meal and meeting new people, we identified important questions and came up with innovative solutions.
Guoda Sulskyte
“Melancholy Matter” is a body of research designed to present a walking performance in ‘dark’ places. Relating historical, cultural and personal narratives together with scientific practice, the project analyses melancholy within the post-soviet political economies in Lithuania, and weaves in philosophy around dark matter research in the universe by referring to the etymology of melancholy that is embodied in fictional black bile.
Being a result of various observations and conversations with dark matter physicists, butchers, and biochemists, my film and sound installation probes the idea of taking imaginative ‘domains’ to explore alternative methods of questioning reality. Located between fiction and documentary the seemingly disparate contexts that move from body, to socio-political, to cosmological, manifest the realm of the unknown and unexplored, and encapsulate issues of fear of the unknown, national identity, and feelings of emptiness and grief.
Thanks to the Tom Fund, the first leg of my project’s tour around those dark places managed to happen in the deepest dark matter research place in the UK and the second deepest place in Europe. The fund enabled me to invite the Cultural Attaché of the Lithuanian Embassy in the UK and other audience members to come to the Boulby Underground Laboratory and watch my film, debuted 1.1 km beyond the reach of cosmic rays.
Rachel Rolston
Today our needs, likes and personality traits are constantly being predicted by algorithms fuelled by social media data. But just how accurate are these predictions? And if we create a world based on these predictions, what world are we creating? And where are the ethics of design in all of this?
My film ‘Regents Park is likely to _______’ follows a character created by the IMB Watson Personality Insight algorithm, using information about Regents Park from Google reviews, local news stories and the parks history. Parodying Vogue magazine’s ‘73 Questions’ YouTube videos, I’ve re-appropriated this commercial interview style as a method to depict the algorithm’s ability to develop insight and consumer traits.
I am also hosting an interview on 13.06.19 with a character created by the same Personality Insight algorithm, using project descriptions and information about our degree show, ‘The Milk Has Turned Against Us’ to visualise a character who represents the graduating class as a creative unit.
The Tom Fund enabled me to attend an introduction to counselling course at Goldsmiths, allowing me to learn and compare how user-centred therapies and design, incorporate listening. To understand the social implications behind this methodology and has subsequently improved my own ability to listen, which is now a key aspect of my research and design practise.
Charlie Brookes & Olivia Fitzpatrick
Method Agency was the collaboration and curation of three projects, hosted by the collective structure of our studio practise.
Behind the scenes falls secondary to the performance, but methods of making are often enactments of performance itself. Through the languages of the body and verse, what is usually an opaque finality Method-Agency makes transparent for all to see.
Method-Agency is an interdisciplinary collective casting the method as the spectacle. By this definition of process, although the skin of individual works appears different, the flesh beneath feels familiar. The stage is seeping between script, cast, prop and tool. If theatre has no beginning, no end nor boundary, what might this say for those a stage and those not?
We used Tom Fund to fund and curate our first event in Peckham's Asylum Chapel. This fund helped us secure the venue; a large enough space to host over 20 artists, designers, filmmakers, performers and musicians from Goldsmiths, as well as a number of individuals from other universities across the UK. Not only did this fund help progress our collective project, but also provide a platform for others to show off work in progress outside of the university.
Aaron Panesar
Masculine Trajectories utilises design led action to intervene within the climate of masculinity in contemporary society and culture. Through the development of a set of discursive ‘tools’ that facilitate conversation, the aim is to form new language surrounding our individual, and collective understanding of masculinity, highlighting the nuances and complexities that exist within the dense subject matter.
Focusing on three areas: Artefacts, Language and Empty Your Pockets, these engagements provoke participants to engage with material collected through first hand research, and consequently draw on personal experiences.
The Tom Fund allowed me to iterate my tools in a higher resolution, but more importantly it allowed me to host a public launch for the project on the 26th of April at Safehouse 2, in Peckham. This was invaluable, as my project was able to occupy a space in the real world and to create rich moments of exchange between participants of the engagements, as well as providing the project with an abundance of ways in which to progress.
Phoenix Hamilton
Sharing a similar methodology and entangled themes, ‘Thank God That’s Not Me’ is a triptych of short films that constructs a discourse around public shaming through the tropes of the spectacle and reality television. Generated from primary interviews and existing transcripts, film scripts are forged to manipulate voices to critically establish new narratives. The first film, entitled ‘Thank God That’s Not Me’, takes interviews I did with individuals operating within the realms of ethics and Reality TV in which they discuss fame and becoming the spectacle. The second film, ‘Noncebusters’, combines interviews I did with vigilante paedophile hunters with the comments on their Facebook livestream videos exposing ‘predators’, debating if their actions can be justified or if they are a twisted form of entertainment. And the final film, ‘Gov Island’ explores the performance of humiliation upon the political stage by combining transcripts from both Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign statements and ITV’s high-profile Love Island episodes.
The Tom Fund helped me to realize the scripts I had constructed by enabling me to hire seven actors across the three films, an integral part of the film making process. Without the help of the Tom Fund I truly don’t believe my project would have been able to reach its full potential. Thank you.
Maja Nordblom & Sam Warren
We believe that our everyday, mundane choices are rarely considered or thought out. Rather they are spontaneous and instinctual. “What A Wonderful World?” is a sensory led, immersive adventure. Multiple pathways are possible within the narrative of a fragile dystopian future, where our climate has become increasingly volatile. In this scenario, London has begun to flood due to rising sea levels and more irregular weather patterns. Because of this, our experience takes place within a custom set, built to take the appearance of a kitchen within a small apartment in a Central London location.
Fundamentally we have used projectors, multiple computers and a number of sensors and webcams to create a fully functional, stand alone space that takes three people through an experience guided by their own emotional and bodily reactions. Yet the complexity of our work lies in the fact that each of the three audience members that enter the space will hear a different character’s perspective of the events that unfold, therefore simultaneously influencing their own narrative experience, as well as their fellow audience members.
Tom Fund has aided us to realise this ambitious project, allowing us to employ voice actors for our narrative, as well as initiate the construction of our immersive set. We really appreciate the generosity that made our project come to life.
Lily Couchman
Throughout the year, I have created a series of filmed performances in which various characters, both political and anonymous, interact with specifically designed vegan meals. The performances take place within environments in which individuals from marginalised gender groups confessed to feeling anxious or self-consciousness whilst eating.
By dissecting the relationship between food and power, we encourage discussions surrounding the complications of telling anyone what they should or should not be eating. ‘Freedom of Eat’ is a movement refusing to be complicit in the manipulation of people’s diets in order to uphold societal standards of body image.
Being accepted for the Tom Fund allowed me to host my first performative dinner party. I invited strangers to join me for an evening of free vegan food, drinks and entertainment in a gallery space in Peckham, without revealing the underlying theme of my performances.
Having the extra funding took away a lot of pressure, as the time that I would have been working in order to afford to host this dinner party, I spent refining my ideas. Knowing that my work would be viewed by a wider audience through the Tom Fund newsletter and website, I held myself to a higher standard, wanting to improve every aspect of my project to showcase my full potential as a designer.