National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) Studentship

Supervisor: Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester

Institutional email: anna.adahl@network.rca.ac.uk

Everyday billions of people circulate in and around urban and digitally supervised infrastructures, acting together in a coordinated manner. These synchronised, system-operated crowds first emerged with the onset of industrialism, that is, with the development of machines and technologies that have accelerated our modes of production and have systematised many facets of our everyday existence. Today crowds are represented through new technologies that simulate our own collective behaviours.  The purpose of this practice-based research is to investigate the aesthetics and politics of crowd simulations that are generated by new computational software and algorithms. The proposed study will be guided by the following  questions:

• How can new technologies and artistic processes provide new modes of visualisation and critical reflection
on the aesthetics and politics of today’s digitized crowds?
• How do we understand our embodied selves through these algoritmically programmed crowd simulations?
• How can computer generated simulated crowds model our collective behaviour and gestural patterns?

My research addresses these timely and urgent questions in the context of crowd simulations as a rapidly growing
collective phenomenon.