THOMAS McLUCAS

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Liminal Archive | Liminal Archive | Liminal Archive | Liminal Archive | Liminal Archive |  Liminal Archive |

In this ongoing collaboration with Limbo Accra, I have been designing immersive digital experiences using the scanned archive of unfinished construction projects in West Africa which Limbo Accra have been collecting. These buildings represent grand visions of incomplete African futures. In bringing these buildings to life through film and video games, and presenting this phenomenon to new audiences, we hope to flip the narrative on these sites, presenting their opportunity. We encourage viewers to optimistically speculate on what might come next for them. Parts of this ongoing work are currently shown at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting | The Quiet Enchanting |

On this project I created visualisations for speculative design agency Superflux alongside their internal team based on collaborative research between Superflux and King’s College London. We created a techno-mythic frieze on the Strand, using a 3d modelled environment and AI generated assets. The piece speculated on a time of ecological abundance, envisaging a just transition in London for human and non-human agents.  

These visualisations will be installed at a large scale on the Strand, opposite Somerset House from the 17th October 2023 until Spring 2024.    

 Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina | Aurora Ex Machina |

The project is concerned with the intersection between architecture and technology as a means for social reproduction. It challenges the contemporary state’s reliance on AI and the promise of technical resolution to socio-political issues. This is explored in a Finnish context focusing on the tension between the constitution, which conflates the privacy of the home with data privacy, and the state-sponsored AI program, Aurora AI. The mass housing system developed by Puutalo Oy in the post-war years is used as a conduit to describe the algorithmic logic of systems like Aurora and their flattening, normalising effects. The resultant proposal is a speculative future within which a designed algorithm infects/disrupts the Aurora Puutalo housing model, emanating from the data disturbances of an individual sauna and eventually taking over in Marttila, a suburb of Helsinki.

Developing methodologies of architectural masking and glitch, the project uses various methods of data-bending in order to create disturbances to undermine the normative and idealised vision of Puutalo Oy. The starting point was using the sauna as a typology to sit in opposition to this model housing. The sauna contaminates the image of Puutalo Oy and resists its normativity.

See an in depth project overview here  

    

Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance | Body Surveillance |


Contemporary wearable devices tap into more than quantitative data. The emotional attachment to the processes of homeostasis reflect our proximity to our bodies, and thus the mediation of these processes through wearables change our relationship to our natural senses. The changing proximity to the extraction of our bodily data describes a new form of emotional capitalism.

The project opens the black box of proprietary wearables and displays associated technologies spread across the body, making explicit the body being mined. The resultant device establishes a connection across the body, between ECGreadings and bodycam imagery. The device takes readings and photographs the user’s surroundings simultaneously, highlighting actors within around them. This acts as a clear trade-off between surveillance and sensing of the self. Surveillance technology in this instance acts as a way to recontextualise bodily readings, connecting statistics to a time and environment. The data collected is stored openly online, devaluing the information through accessibility. The process both reclaims the user’s biometric data but also appropriates images of other bodies, placing the user in the position of both mined body and platform.

The collected data is exhibited in a performance of the device. The strength of electrical heart signals modulates the user’s environment. The bodycam imagery and collected biometric data are reunited with the body through a projection which acts as the final transformation of the data.

Performance here  

   

Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction | Platform Jurisdiction |

This project, Platform Jurisdiction, is focused on the platformisation of border control. It is imagined as an archive and exchange for media generated by displaced people attempting to cross the channel and those within their support networks. The proposal is scalable through a series of interventions which I have divided into four phases.

Through a focus on the English Channel I investigated physical border infrastructure and government policy in order to understand how a digital hostile environment functions as part of a larger border apparatus.

Calais is a hotbed for the generation of media relating to migration.  Stakeholders project contrasting pictures of life along this border. In June 2021 a TikTok video went viral, showing an overcrowded dinghy full of people speeding across the Channel. The content was similar in appearance to any of the supposedly journalistic reporting in the Channel the year before. The only noticeable difference was that the camera was in the hands of a migrant. Priti Patel sent a letter to social media companies calling on them to remove ‘posts which promote and even glamourise these lethal crossings’ calling them ‘totally unacceptable, the argument being that ‘they encourage others to leave a safe European country and put their and their family’s lives at risk.’

The frequency of the forms which make up the physical security infrastructure at the Port of Calais offers the possibility of interventions which hack these structures in a manner which is scalable through repetition, allowing sensitive data to transverse this border.

In developing this phased approach I aim to suggest a speculative proposal which adapts to the temporality of the conditions along the border and reacts to the choreography of movements across the border.    

Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar | Kasputin Yar |

DWA & Co was a collective comprising three University of Westminster alumni (Alexandru Oltean, Jay Patel and myself) and current University of Westminster senior lecturer, Dr Victoria Watson formed in 2020.  

Our competition entry for ‘The Last Nuclear Memorial’, was situated on Kasputin Yar, a nuclear weapon and rocket development/testing site in Russia. The intervention reimagined the site as a nuclear waste storage facility, uilising the site’s geometry as a logic for entombing nuclear waste. This plane was interupted by a disk shaped object, presenting as something not of this world. Internally the space was mirrored to produce the effect of an infinite bubble chamber (a nuclear testing device). This hard contained exterior and seemingly infinite interior allude to the containment of peternatural nuclear power.    

Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure | Altar of Contemporary Pleasure |

The project, designed as A Pilgrimage from Pig to Philosopher King, addresses the notion of an urban pleasure garden through Plato’s Republic. In Greek society cities were centred around holy sites. The 19th-century saw culture replace religion in much of western society, hence museums took the place of religious architecture as epitomised by the allusion of the Natural History Museum to a ‘cathedral of nature’. The project is perceived as an altar accommodating the pleasures/vices of the characters who degrade Plato’s perfect society into four imperfect societies and manifest themselves as debaucherous activities apparent in the English pleasure garden. The altar is split into two halves, a monument which sits above ground and its contemporary reading located below ground. A Platonic schedule of accommodation occupies both halves. These consist of a timocratic maze, oligarchic betting den, democratic speakers’ corner, tyrannical brothel, and archive for the philosopher king.

The project treats Albertopolis a ‘holy site’. It is designed to accommodate the mortal characters of Plato’s Republic (aspects of which exist in all of us) rather than the divinities of semester one. The architecture is imagined from relics of 18th century typologies from the English pleasure garden as well as relics from ancient Greek art and architecture. These relics serve as the physical embodiment of civilisations at a moment in time. This attitude towards the preservation of culture comes from an 18th&19th century antiquarian mindset, one which saw ancient art and mythology inform their ideals, easily seen when aligning ideals of beauty which we have inherited from that period with those of classical sculpture. This manifested itself architecturally in revival buildings, where historic aesthetics were adopted. My project borrows from this language and by contrasting classical and contemporary elements which instigates an anthropological study of how our culture and civilization has been informed by these ideals which were in turn informed by ancient culture which they imported as part of their expansionist programme.    

Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai |

This salon is a group of three spaces. These spaces are designed in the spirit of three minor Hellenistic gods, three of the nine muses, Thalia, Terpsichore and Urania. The project critiques the Natural History Museum by using ideas from the Birth of Tragedy, through the perspective of characters from antiquity the project focuses around themes of civilisation, high culture and chronology. The project is set in a distorted timeline where Greek gods, Victorian nobility and modern tourists interact.

The three interventions are set in the Bacchic ruin of the Natural History Museum, which becomes the garden in which the follies can be orchestrated. The mise-en-scene resembling that of a picturesque painting, the Roman Campagna or Tintern Abbey.

The museum has been flayed in this way as punishment for presenting an overly picturesque vision of nature. Flaying was a common method of torture in Greek mythology, often in response to undermining the gods, as can been seen in the tale of the satyr Marsyas who challenged Apollo to a musical duel. As Hellenists worshiped pantheistic gods, divine embodiments of aspects of nature, censoring the ugliness and wildness of nature, taming it for display as part of a controlled carefully careless picture, 18th and 19th century methods of natural representation and study are sinful. These picturesque ideals alongside scientific truths conjured by the dominance of visual study at the time were at odds with one another and the museum became an embodiment of this.

   

Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism | Ministry of Cosmism |

Cosmists by nature are interested in the unseen, therefore in radiation, so the radio waves  emitted by TV towers seemed an appropriate line of inquiry. Stevenage has become a satellite town to London as has always been expected despite the town  being designed to be a hub of industry in its own right. The town has suffered from a lack of  investment in its centre as people are drawn away to the metropolis. This has led to a distrust  of institutions amongst locals due to the overwhelming amount of mis-information being spread by the mass of media outlets. The project is a polemic solution to propagate one media outlet from one source, a Fernsehturm for Stevenage.

Watching television we watch as individuals unlike the collective of cinema, but, if everyone is  watching the same recording the sphere of influence of the TV tower becomes the theatre.   I have proposed a canopy beneath the tower which is similarly modulated by radiation, however, it is reflective of the tower’s output, progressing at the average wavelength of radio waves. The canopy is a physical manifestation of the work which occurs beneath it, between scientists  working on technologies which further the cosmists reach physically or the artists who further the  reach culturally. Increasing the sphere of influence of the ideology. Becoming a ministry of truth.  The structure of the canopy ends at a naked edge alluding to a continuation of the waves, however, the grid of the chessboard which the eatery pawns were laid on remains in the form of a  service grid at the datum of the wave’s equilibrium.

Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures | Museum of Digital Futures

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The Museum for the Digital future of Stevenage is a dual pronged proposal commissioned bya fictional body,  International Institute of Cosmism (IIC), with the aim of expanding Stevenage Museum, in order to display the technological history of Stevenage, as well as propagating cosmist philosophy through the reform of the  technology sector. The IIC will encourage local industry to move away from the development and production  of militaristic machinery and software towards humanitarian technology, leading the way through utilising  current hardware and software fabricated in Stevenage to produce voxel architecture.

The idea for voxelated architecture is derived from Tsiolkovsky’s theorems of life in which many units  become a complex whole. The units provide infinite possibilities as they are arranged and rearranged into organic and inorganic masses. The architecture floats in order to disassociate itself with Earth much in the same way as Malevich’s architektons disassociate through floating in a blank background, providing no sense of scale or datum. The voxels are programable to adapt to the environment they are exposed to. The objective is  to create an architecture which can respond to any environment, in doing so the architecture is only limited  by the form of the voxel.

The museum acts as a ‘Picture of Stevenage’ like Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, a structure which is  a product of Stevenage, having grown out of the carpark and exhibiting some of the original brutalist design  features of Stevenage Leisure Centre. Over time the building has taken on some of the distress that weapons  developed in Stevenage have exported to the rest of the world, while the town remains unchanged. The IIC  have taken on this image with the aim of restoring it through education. The building will house artefacts  from Stevenage past and present, good and bad, and suggest how the technology can be used for voxelated architecture as a precedent for other benevolent industry in Stevenage.