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︎︎︎The Spaceship Ziggurat and the Ripped Concrete: Digging in the Internet for the Ruins of the Birmingham Central Library︎︎︎
Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Critical and Historical Studies, School of Art & Humanities
At the Royal College of Art (2024)

This is a story about a building.
It was a building that was once made of concrete.
It is a building that has now been demolished.
There were no explosions, fireworks or light shows, just a slow and brutal deconstruction, an unspectacular spectacle.
It is a site of absence. But in the absence there remains possibility. The possibility of regeneration.
This is a story about the future. This is also a story about the past. It is the future in the past and the past in the future, a future future in the past and a past future in the future.
This is a story about movement and mutation. It is about stable and unstable spaces. It is about dislocation and disorientation. It is a forensic fictioning.
It was a building that was once made of concrete.
It is a building that has now been demolished.
There were no explosions, fireworks or light shows, just a slow and brutal deconstruction, an unspectacular spectacle.
It is a site of absence. But in the absence there remains possibility. The possibility of regeneration.
This is a story about the future. This is also a story about the past. It is the future in the past and the past in the future, a future future in the past and a past future in the future.
This is a story about movement and mutation. It is about stable and unstable spaces. It is about dislocation and disorientation. It is a forensic fictioning.
Documentation of practice:
︎Phase One Documentation︎︎︎
︎Phase Two Documentation︎︎︎
︎Phase Three Documentation︎︎︎
︎Phase Three (NOIA Magazine pg 38-47) ︎︎︎
︎Phase Three (Fractured Perspectives Script)︎︎︎
︎Phase Three (Concrete RIP book)︎︎︎
︎Phase Conclusion Documentation︎︎︎
Supporting video/moving image work:
Please note that videos play automatically so you may have to restart.
On The Subject of Precarity
4 Google Walks
The.Game.2017.WEBRIP
Fractured Perspectives (Image Sequence for a Perfromed Lecture)
Common Ground (recording of live animation)
Links:
Links:
︎www.concrete.rip︎︎︎
Conc(re)te is an open-access digital resource for architects, designers, concrete enthusiasts and brutalist utopians. Launched
at RE-FORM Design Biennale→ in Denmark, this archive is constructed from 3D scans of concrete debris saved from the Birmingham Central Library. These digital fragments are available as mutant copies to download, re-use and re-purpose, creating the opportunity to rethink our relationship to the materials of our constructed world(s) and the narratives imbedded within them.
︎On the Subject of Precarity︎︎︎
‘On the Subject of Precarity‘ was a group exhibition with artists Betsy Bradley, Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, and Rafal Zajko. The term precarity – a state of perpetual instability – seems to be especially pertinent within the current moment. Informed by a widespread sense of collective societal anxiety, the exhibition explores the perception of precarity in the entanglement of past, present and imagined futures.
︎Hard Blink︎︎︎
Hard Blink is a short text written for On_Illustration
︎By The City︎︎︎
Artist residency with Plan8t and the Museum of Waste in Changsha, China. New works were made in respose to BSBcore, a new building material developed by the Broad Group and that is seen as a sustainable alternative to concrete.
︎Fractured Perspectives (text)︎︎︎
This performative lecture weaves together real and imagined histories to investigate the relocation of the Birmingham Central Library to Taiwan in 2018. Adopting the role of the cyber-flaneur to navigate through time and space, exploring the implications of a landscape dematerialised and the potential of moving buildings; the Internet providing a ready-made aesthetic to visually articulate the distortion of time and history, describing a world where ruins have become utopias and where archaeology and futurism merge.
