Tom Corby | University of the Arts London (original) (raw)

Videos by Tom Corby

Our animation shows how the build-up of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses has radically altered the... more Our animation shows how the build-up of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses has radically altered the Earth’s atmosphere. The work maps from the industrial revolution to the present day the regions contributing most to the climate crisis, which can be traced through the stalagmite growths animating out from the different countries. Beginning with the UK in the 1750s, emissions from coal start enveloping the planet, other regions soon follow. By the late 1800s through to the current period, growing industrial and extraction activity in the Global North is responsible for 92% of CO2 with 8% coming from the Global South. The spread of CO2 described in the animation mirrors the wider historic processes of power distribution visited on poorer countries and shows that the atmosphere is as contested a space as the territories beneath it. Our animation informs the need for equitable solutions to the climate crisis that are mindful of the historic consequences of carbon exploitation.

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Papers by Tom Corby

This is the catalogue accompanying Blood & Bones: Living with Cancer, an exhibition at UCLH’s... more This is the catalogue accompanying Blood & Bones: Living with Cancer, an exhibition at UCLH’s The Street Gallery on Euston Road, London. It runs from 28th February until 24th April 2019, and is open 24/7. Blood & Bones: Living with Cancer is an exhibition of work by internationally exhibited and award-winning artist Tom Corby whose poignant images combine quantitative medical/clinical data describing the artist's Multiple Myeloma* with the qualitative data generated by his personal experience of living with cancer. Corby has developed a range of simple data driven approaches to track, share and make sense of his haematological cancer. These include data indexes capturing both clinical and personal experiences of the physical, emotional, and affective impact of living with cancer as a patient, artist, and human being. Engaging with issues at the heart of UCLH’s mission, and the concerns of its patients, Blood & Bones: Living with Cancer presents different ways to represent the subjective experience of someone suffering from illness, providing various entry points for audiences/viewers to engage the exhibition theme. For example, some photographs are of the types of head-ware patients wear while undergoing chemotherapy. Others use the visual language of data visualization and medical graphing, but are here deployed by the patient and used to articulate personal rather than medical data. In this, the works in the exhibition are connected to the popular use of personal narratives such as blogging to discuss illness in ways that are often moving, funny, informative, and therapeutic. In sharing his personal data, Corby has sought to demystify the experience of serious illness by drawing attention to the multiple experiences that are shared between patients, their families and clinicians, in order to contribute to understanding to what he calls ‘the ecologies of treatment [in which] patients, diseases and medics are entangled’. Blood & Bones: Living with Cancer is curated by Dr Marquard Smith (UCL Institute of Education) and Dr Rishi Das-Gupta (formerly Director of Innovation, UCLH now at Royal Brompton). It is accompanied by a series of public engagement activities (curated by Agnese Reginaldo) and this catalogue (designed by Mark Little) published by The Archives Gallery. The project is in collaboration with UCLH Arts and Heritage UCLH NHS Foundation Trust’s arts programme. UCLH arts and heritage is committed to providing a welcoming, uplifting environment for all patients, visitors and staff through the use of a varied and stimulating arts and heritage programme. Its work aims to improve the patient experience, boost staff morale, increase engagement with the arts and celebrate the Trust’s unique heritage and community. The exhibition, associated events and catalogue are funded by Macmillan Cancer Support.

Intellect Press eBooks, 2011

... After dispensing with capitalism, Cartesian and postmodern thinking, Guattari turns his fire ... more ... After dispensing with capitalism, Cartesian and postmodern thinking, Guattari turns his fire on the 'archaizing, folkloristic tendencies' (1989: 135 ... for a science and technology dehabituated from a capitalist project, and an ethical aesthetics within which computational media has a ...

Journal of Visualization, Dec 1, 2008

In this paper, implementation and visualization of scientific arts are described using some examp... more In this paper, implementation and visualization of scientific arts are described using some examples of application in subject research areas, such as sculpture, archeology, fine arts and information aesthetics, which have been discussed through the Scientific Art Session at FLUCOME9, Tallahassee, Florida, 2007-9. In the application to sculpture, stereo visualization techniques, such as anaglyph stereo visualization and integral imaging technique, are introduced to realize the three-dimensional geometry of sculpture to enhance visual impact on the art. The second application is the flow visualization technique for archeology, where the vortices behind the river stones are studied to understand the origin of patterns on Jomon pottery. Interestingly, such vortex patterns also appear in the paintings of fine arts. The third example is the visualization of information aesthetics, where the Web information, such as public media and stock market, are visualized through scientific techniques. These examples of visualization of scientific arts provide the present state of the art in interdisciplinary visualization.

Intellect Books, Sep 19, 2012

Leonardo, Oct 1, 2008

Immersive installation visualizing newsgroup postings as weather formations. Article Frontispiece... more Immersive installation visualizing newsgroup postings as weather formations. Article Frontispiece. Lucy Kimbell and Andrew Barry, Pindices project, website component, 2005. (© Lucy Kimbell and Andrew Barry) The front page of the website provided an "at a glance" view of the types and frequency of activities that individual participants were engaged in.

I Stood Up, was a practice-based research project developed collaboratively between an interdisci... more I Stood Up, was a practice-based research project developed collaboratively between an interdisciplinary team of artists and designers based in London, and Delhi and Ahmedabad, India between September 2014 and April 2015. The research team of Corby (visual arts), Williams (fashion design and sustainability), Sheth (exhibition and spatial design), and Dhar (performance and design) was convened at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad in early 2014 supported by the British Council and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Our project hypothesized a role for interdisciplinary design practices to act as a platform for public articulation of ‘real world’ problems in urban settings with a particular focus on the often connected problems of environmental degradation and gendered violence. Completed work consisted of workshop situations, installations, graphical posters and T-shirt designs. Exhibitions and events took place in Ahmedabad, New Delhi and London. Exhibitions/events/workshops Unbox at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, 5-7th February 2014 Unbox Festival at IGNCA Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi from 12 to 14 December 2014. 'I stood up' workshop and exhibition, Faculty of Architecture at the Centre for Environment Planning & Technology (CEPT University) in Ahmedabad between December 2014-March 2015. 'I stood up' workshop and presentation, at Being Human, a festival of the Humanities, 12 Nov- 22 Nov 2015 Funding AHRC Research Grant I Stood Up to Violence (Principal Investigator) £25,000 (2014) AHRC Unbox Fellowship, National Institute of Design, India (2014)

Journal of Visual Art Practice, Dec 22, 2022

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Part 1: Contexts Chapter 1. Introduction Tom Corby Chapter ... more Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Part 1: Contexts Chapter 1. Introduction Tom Corby Chapter 2. The History of Network Art Charlie Gere Chapter 3. Art as Experience: Meet the Active Audience Josephine Bosma Chapter 4. Context Specific Curating on the Web (CSCW?) Sarah Cook Chapter 5. The Ludic Hack: Artistic Explorations of Computer Games Tilman Baumgartel Part 2: Practices Chapter 6. Grave Digging and Net Art: A Proposal for the Future Natalie Bookchin Chapter 7. Inquires in Infomics Lisa Jevbratt Chapter 8. Softer Side of Art Maciej Wisniewski Chapter 9. System Poetics and Software Refuseniks Corby & Baily Chapter 10. Digital Bop Poetics Mark Amerika Chapter 11. The Wrong Categories Thomson & Craighead and Kris Cohen Chapter 12. If Networked Art is the Answer What is the Question? Lucy Kimbell Chapter 13. Dow Chemical just says 'yes' to Bhopal The Yes Men Chapter 14. Life Sharing: a Real-time Digital Self-portrait 0100101110101101.ORG

Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator is a co-authored book that identifies where we’re at ... more Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator is a co-authored book that identifies where we’re at and where we might be going vis-a-vis the idea of research in the art school, higher education, museums and galleries, and the creative and cultural industries more generally. By way of this book, the authors want to ask why and how specific modes of practice (artistic practice, curating, and practices of pedagogy) operate, and what particular kinds of knowledges artistic research, the curatorial, and the educator generate and disseminate. Concerned for ‘practice’ in our knowledge-based polis, where knowledge – which includes practice as knowledge – is institutionalized and instrumentalized, at the same time we’re interested in the potentialities of how ‘[practice] might be comprehended and described as a specific mode of generating and disseminating knowledge’, and ‘the particular kind of knowledge that can be produced within the artistic realm by… practitioners… who operate in its vari...

Journal of Visual Art Practice

In an era when public issues of concern are increasingly framed, mirrored and played out as excha... more In an era when public issues of concern are increasingly framed, mirrored and played out as exchanges and circulations of data (e.g. via Twitter and Facebook), we are told that big data technologies promise fundamental changes in our ability to represent and understand human behavior. This practice-based research set out to explore the cultural implications of this by asking how digital artists might use social media data to reflect upon social, political and technological change by producing speculative geographies derived from social media posts and geo-data. Artworks produced during research were internationally exhibited at: 2016: "Diffrazioni Multimedia Festival' Palazzo Rosselli del Turco, Florence, Italy. 2015: Geo-Codes: Mapping a Practice in the Post-Print Age exhibition, China Academy of Art, Hangzou 2015: '25' London Gallery West, London 2015: Athens Digital Arts Festival, Greece 2014: International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), Dubai Funding AHRC ...

Minima-Maxima employs a time-series of climate data from the arctic between 1984 – 2012 derived f... more Minima-Maxima employs a time-series of climate data from the arctic between 1984 – 2012 derived from drifting buoys and satellite measurements of sea ice age. The work comes in two parts – a data driven moving image work and a physical installation showing the yearly summer-winter fluctuations of arctic sea ice age (minima-maxima) over an extended period of 25 years. The installation presents a terser set of approaches by arranging the entire data set as stacked print-outs. Organised quasi-bureaucratically, the data is opened to public scrutiny and navigation, reminding us that data is always situated and embodied in contextual, discursive and material practices that exceed a technical base. Funding for the project comes from Arts Council England and the Natural Environment Research Council. Advice for the project came from Dr Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley from the British Antarctic Survey, and Nathan Cunningham from the UK Data Archive

The Lancet Haematology, 2022

The Northern Polar Studies is a large-scale screen-based installation which uses data-sets from d... more The Northern Polar Studies is a large-scale screen-based installation which uses data-sets from drifting buoys and satellite measurements of Arctic sea ice. This data has been used to model the retreat of the Arctic going back the 1980s by examining the age and distribution of sea ice. In animating this data visually, the work reveals an uncanny vision of phantasmagoric shapes, figures and tendrils of environmental ruination over an extended time period. In part equally fascinating and abject, the work expresses the plasticity, vulnerability and multidimensionality of environmental sites in an era of anthropogenic forcing.

Journal of Visual Culture, 2017

This Roundtable on Numbers/Data began life as a live, public event on the power and influence of ... more This Roundtable on Numbers/Data began life as a live, public event on the power and influence of numbers in contemporary visual, material, immaterial, and media cultures.1 To imagine such an ambitious event, and to do it justice, the event’s programme brought together academics, industry professionals, and practitioners. Taking Steven Connor’s recently published book Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (2016) as a springboard, each contributor to the event was invited to deliver a 10-minute presentation, an opening statement to set the scene, and to raise fundamental questions to be considered in the ensuing discussion. The authors retain this structure here, along with some of the informality that live conversation affords. By way of these four presentations and the conversation between the event’s speakers and audience, the Roundtable raises a series of pressing concerns around data and big data, life tracking, digital health studies, and the quantifiable self; the quantitat...

Journal of Visualization, 2008

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Intellect Press eBooks, 2011

Journal of Visualization, Dec 1, 2008

Intellect Books, Sep 19, 2012

Leonardo, Oct 1, 2008

Journal of Visual Art Practice, Dec 22, 2022

Journal of Visual Art Practice

The Lancet Haematology, 2022

Journal of Visual Culture, 2017

Journal of Visualization, 2008

Leonardo, 2021

The authors discuss a series of artworks produced since 2009, including The Southern Ocean Studie... more The authors discuss a series of artworks produced since 2009, including The Southern Ocean Studies (2012), The Northern Polar Studies (2014) and Carbon Topographies (2020). Through this work they explore how climate models can be employed to develop data-driven imaginaries of climate change, its impacts and causes. They argue for the experiential potential of this information for producing differently situated ways of knowing climate, framing this through a methodological approach described as “data manifestation.”

Network Arts Practices and Positions, 2005

This chapter charts the outcome of a 1 0-year collaboration, which has sought to develop alternat... more This chapter charts the outcome of a 1 0-year collaboration, which has sought to develop alternative software, and network artifacts to those promoted by mainstream technology providers. 'System Poetics and Software Refuseniks' is split into three sections. In the first part, 'positior;s/(we present a number of overlapping arguments that situate our work as critical practice. In the second part, 'practices_,;(four projects are discussed 5) that relate to these positions and in the third part, 'processes,' we provide a case study of a project made between 1996 and 2000. The approach taken in this final section is descriptive and reflective. It is offered as a form of mapping that lays bare creative approaches, and highlights the serendipitous processes that evolve in computer-based artwork-an approach that appears to conflict with a technological discourse that places the computer as the apogee of the measured and the rational. Positions Technology is not merely instrumental Our overarching position is that artists need to develop software and network technologies that go beyond the narrow instrumental and utilitarian focus described by technologically deterministic discourses. In doing so artists can reveal both how technology operates in social and cultural contexts in complex and sometimes hidden ways and also suggest alternative technological forms that are inclusive of emotional, political and reflexive structures. Networks induce hybrid practice Networks pervade and cut across disciplines. This layered horizontal aspect allows us to relate and mix differing intellectual and aesthetic domains with relative ease and in doing so develop hybrid artifacts. In particular we connect avant-garde traditions concerned with the use of found (data} objects, with approaches borrowed from computer science concerned with simulating biological complexity. These relationships allow us to develop new ways of thinking about how works operate perceptually; which leads to our next position.

London Routledge, 2005

Unpublished proof for Introduction to the Book "Network Art Practices and Positions