Our contemporary world is saturated with feedback systems; in our workplaces, in our everyday lives and in our technology and media systems.
My artworks explore how they act as a form of control and how we interact with them, often unconsciously performing prescribed roles.
Increasingly I use software, programming and emerging technology to explore these ideas. My artworks have also utilised methods of reconstruction, and restaging, focusing on historical moments, objects or events that have instructive parallels with the present.
Many artworks are collaborations with other writers, artists and technologists, including Tom McCarthy, Sarah Selby, Steve Ruston, Jamie Lamb and Nathan Semertzidis.
I am also Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, at the University of West England in Bristol and co-curator of the Bristol based digital art festival Control Shift.
machine_in_the_middle (2021)
Video, Hardware / software system, EEG headset and graphic:
machine_in_the_middle is a reworking of a Man (or Machine) in the Middle cyber attack, using EEG brainwave sensing, emotion recognition and facial muscle stimulation, made with World Snooker Champion Steve Davis.
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Recent exhibitions
machine_in_the_middle in ‘The Downloadable Brain’, Cognitive Sensations 2021
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Fear Filter in ‘Computer Vision Art Gallery’, 2021, curated by by Luba Elliott and Xavier Snelgrove.
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Milgram Re-enactment Essays
The Milgram Re-enactment: Essays on Rod Dickinson's re-enactment of Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment
The three essays contained in this book ask a series of questions about the re-enactment and the original experiment.
The book is edited by Steve Rushton and the essays are by: Vivienne Gaskin, Tom McCarthy and Steve Rushton
The essays explore key ideas about re-enactment and Milgram’s experiment including: repetition and trauma , 'the banality of evil' (Arendt, 1963), classic forms of tragic drama, the ethics of representation, theatricality and mediation.
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Fear Filter (2017-18)
Large scale animation, user generated photo stream, mobile phone web app and live data:
Fear Filter is a digital photo stream produced by a photo filters mobile phone web app. The filters visualise the UK Terror Threat Level using live and historical data from MI5, the UK government security agency.
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