Tomas Percival is an artist, researcher, and writer. His work critically investigates the intersections of space and security, with a particular interest in structures of assessment, risk governance, carceral geographies, data infrastructures, and border administration. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was an artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was also a Lecturer on the MA Research Architecture / Forensic Architecture programme. He is currently an Affiliated Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
tomas.percival@mailbox.org
Countering Risk: John, David, Edward
Media installation, 33-minute loop
Date: April–May 2025
Institution: Dropcity, Milan
Countering Risks: John, David, Edward is a media installation produced for the ‘Prison Times: Spatial Dynamics of Penal Environments’ exhibition at Dropcity Center for Architecture and Design in Milan. In the English and Welsh prison system, risk assessment systems play a critical role in determining how individuals are managed. Countering Risks examines these processes, focusing on the Offender Assessment System (OASys)—a database used to evaluate individuals and help determine the forms of oversight they are subjected to. This installation emerges from an investigative and experimental process in which Percival worked with three formerly incarcerated men to access and examine their OASys files and produce counter-narratives. In these audio works, the men share their experience of assessment and reflect on how the system shaped their time in prison.
The audios in the installation were developed in collaboration with three previously incarcerated individuals: John, David, and Edward. This installation is part of a broader research project titled Prison Records.
Artwork
Exhibition
Common Sensing
Editor with Riccardo Badano, Susan Schuppli, and Asli Uludağ
Date: May 2025
Publisher: Spector Books
Available here
Common Sensing brings together practitioners and thinkers whose work engages with the relationships between different modes of sensing environmental conditions and the role of sense-making in producing collective claims and forms of resistance. Contributions move across a diverse set of contexts: from managing forest fires in China Muerta, Chile; replanting sabr, a prickly pear cactus in Palestine; the cultivation of peasant seeds by farmers in southern Italy; to communal walking projects in the settlements of Karachi, Pakistan; and grassroots campaigns opposing geothermal energy production in Turkey. Contributions also explore how these everyday ‘common sense’ responses to local conditions operate alongside more technical forms of sensing, including X-ray imaging, satellite monitoring, ground penetrating radar, bio-acoustic recording, and smart sensor technologies. How might a poly-perspectival set of methodologies and techniques enable the production of a new ‘sensory commons’ that is grounded in an ethics of care and guided by a planetary sense of communal well-being?
Contributors: Al-Wah'at Collective, Jacob Bertilsson, Adam Bobette, Cooking Sections & Enrico Milazzo, Ifor Duncan, Jennifer Gabrys, Nazia Khan, Margarida Mendes, Hannah Meszaros-Martin, Sam Nightingale, Godofredo Pereira, George Ridgway, João Ruivo, Ariadna Serrahima, Shela Sheikh, Paulo Tavares, Asli Uludağ, Christina Varvia
Publication
Research
The Material Force of Categories
Special issue of the History of Human Sciences journal
Editor with Sasha Bergstrom-Katz
Date: April 2025
Special Issue here
Open access introduction here
The Material Force of Categories is a special issue of the History of Human Sciences journal. The function of categories of the human sciences is a well-established field of scholarly inquiry, animated by debates over their capacity to reduce, exclude, determine, abstract, produce, loop, control, and/or restrain. This special issue takes an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate urgent questions about the ‘material force’ of categories as they operate in practice. Specifically, we emphasise the plasticity of categories and how their ambivalent boundaries can render their categorical forcefulness continuously operative. Categories morph and shift as they traverse different fields, re-articulating difference as they interact with divergent institutions and epistemic infrastructures. The interdisciplinary articles in this issue explore the material force of categories across varied contexts, including the prison system, digital culture, legal frameworks, psychiatric diagnostics, and applied governmental research. In so doing, the special issue as a whole emphasises the capacious yet persistent nature of categorisation, revealing how, in multiple ways, categories can stabilise the management of people precisely through their inherent structures of contingency and ambivalence.
Contributors: Margarita Aragon, Alfred Freeborn, Eoin Fullam, Becka Hudson, Julian Molina, and Tomas Percival & Sasha Bergstrom-Katz. Publication
Research
Militant Media
Editor with Riccardo Badano and Susan Schuppli
Date: April 2024
Publisher: Spector Books
Available here
Militant Media, the second volume in the Research Architecture book series, engages with the ethical and political implications of media and technology in relation to contemporary struggles and conflicts. In doing so, it reflects upon the changing role of media in justice and human rights campaigns, examining a range of topics from the use of images in campaigning to the evidentiary potential of digital materials in themselves. In addition to critical and theoretical reflections, Militant Media offers a wide range of practice-based projects that have developed oppositional modes of representation and created new aesthetic strategies and tools. Together these contributions seek to challenge prevailing power structures and enable new forms of political solidarity.
Contributors: Simon Barber, Arama Rata, Waireti Roestenburg, & Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho; Ariel Caine & Faiz Abu Rmeleh; Sophie Dyer & Gabriela Ivens; Anna Engelhardt; Kodwo Eshun; Helene Kazan; Júlia Nueno Guitart; Lawrence Abu Hamdan & Ghalya Saadawi; MARA Cohort; Lorenzo Pezzani & Charles Heller; Stafford Scott, Kamara Scott, Katrina Ffrench, Patrick Williams, Becky Clarke, Ilyas Nagdee, & Allan Hogarth; Leila Sibai; Sanjana Varghese; Gwendolyn Wallace; Eyal Weizman, Tomas Percival, & Riccardo Badano.
Publication
Research
Border Environments
Editor with Riccardo Badano and Susan Schuppli
Date: April 2023
Publisher: Spector Books
Available here
Border Environments, the first publication in the Research Architecture series, investigates the entanglement of ecology and migration. It examines the interplay between discriminatory politics, emergent technologies, and bordering practices within the context of (constructed) natures by highlighting a variety of interventions, investigative techniques, visual projects, and modes of witnessing that address the role of both human and more-than-human actors in border struggles. As such, the book is also a provocation that can be used to identify and organise new lines of struggle connecting environmental and mobility justice.
Contributors: Dimitra Andritsou; Areej Ashhab; Border Ecologies Network; Nadine El-Enany; Mustapha Jundi; Stefanos Levidis; Lorenzo Pezzani, Tomas Percival, & Riccardo Badano; Tara Plath; Hanna Rullmann & Faiza Ahmad Khan; Susan Schuppli; Ishita Sharma; Juanita Sundberg; Avi Varma; Gabrielle Wolf.
Publication
Research
Prison Records
Research project
Date: 2019-25
Institution: Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London
Prison Records investigates how the prison records individuals and the mechanisms by which these records are mobilised to govern them. The project offers a conceptualisation of the prison system as a mediatic structure: one that first records and processes aspects of imprisoned individuals (such as their risks, attitudes, behaviours, and offence history), and subsequently enacts modes of oversight, intervention, and decision-making based on these records. The analysis centres on a specific system: the Offender Assessment System (OASys), a computer-based risk assessment tool that has been in operation across the prison system in England and Wales since 2001. It also examines the various conditional pathways, such as ‘offending behaviour’ programmes and interventions, that are required of incarcerated people to demonstrate their risk reduction in the areas determined through assessment processes. As such, the project provides an account of how such mediatic structures shape the position of carceral subjects. It demonstrates how seemingly routine administrative tools, databases, and protocols of information sharing exert profound yet often opaque effects on the lives of incarcerated individuals. These tools not only codify and normalise the structural harms inherent to the carceral system, but also generate new modalities of suffering. However, despite the material force of such systems, Prison Records also foregrounds the resistance and agency of those subjected to them. It explores how people continue to find ways to live within and negotiate these structures, creating rhythms of refusal that contest and redirect these forms of control.
Research
Psychotechne: Assessment, Testing, Categorisation
Two-person exhibition with Sasha Bergstrom-Katz
Date: February–March 2023
Institution: Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London
Further information here
Psychotechne was a two-person exhibition of works by Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Tomas Percival. The artistic research-based projects on view examined how individuals are assessed through tests, forms, and databases that utilise psychometric technologies. A variety of institutions—including educational, medical, and legal systems—utilise such assessments to inform decisions about the people they manage and use these techniques to categorise and move individuals. For example, the outcomes of tests can transfer children into different classrooms based on test-taking abilities; assessments are used to issue diagnoses which have the power to change how people are viewed and how they view themselves; and behavioural and mental health screenings are used to assign categories of “risk” within carceral and penal systems. The two artworks in this exhibition focused on particular case studies to explore how assessment, categorisation, and testing play an active role within institutional decision-making structures.
Psychotechne was funded by Birkbeck, University of London and the Wellcome Trust ISSF Fund. The exhibition was curated by Dr Sarah Marks, Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health.
ArtworkExhibition
The Material Force of Categories
Co-organiser of symposium with Sasha Bergstrom-Katz
Date: 11 March 2023
Institution: Birkbeck, University of London
This symposium, organised in parallel to the Psychotechne exhibition, examined how assessment and categorisation can play an active role in decision-making structures. The event explored how socio-technical systems produce categorisations—particularly categorisations of intelligence, risk, and the subject—in ways that can then be operationalised within broader institutional and epistemic frameworks. The symposium was interested in how such categories are produced through a range of psychosocial, statistical, and technical modes of assessment, including psychometric and psychological testing, risk assessment tools, and machine learning.
Speakers included Ramon Amaro, Margarita Aragon, Anthony Faramelli, Eoin Fullam, Becka Hudson, Simon Jarrett, and Ageliki Lefkaditou.
Event
Research
Index: Navigating the Database
Site-specific project
Date: 23-25 June 2022
Institution: Jan van Eyck Academie
Further information here
Index: Navigating the Database involved a series of interventions and performances in selected locations throughout the Jan van Eyck building. The project experimented with the computational processes and bureaucratic structures that underpin the day-to-day operations of the institution. It involved the installation of RFID key-card activated locks on various spaces, alongside a series of performances in which signers are asked to improvise based on various institutional data and record-keeping structures (the WIFI network log, archival records of managerial meetings, and files from the JVE’s database).
Performed by Kristine Paseka and Dean Parker.
Artwork
Exhibition
Border Environments: The Entangled Politics of Ecology and Migration
Co-organiser of public programme with Riccardo Badano
Date: 12-13 May 2022
Institution: Centre for Research Architecture x Het Nieuwe Instituut
Further information here
This public programme set out to critically investigate the interplay between environmental processes and migration struggles. This two-day programme of talks, projects, screenings, and conversations outlined a conceptual and practical framework for examining how the environment has become an active agent in making cross-border mobilities and immobilities. By examining a number of key issues—including the weaponisation of (semi-)natural landscapes in border situations, the deployment of nature conservation projects, and the transformation of ecosystems through security thinking—the programme aimed to expose the political and material effects of environmental forces in relation to bordering and exclusion.
Including contributions from Dele Adeyemo, Arun Agrawal, Andrea Bagnato, the Border Ecologies Network, Nadine El-Enany, Sara Frikech, Uriel Orlow, Hanna Rullmann & Faiza Ahmad Khan, The School of Mutants, Juanita Sundberg, and Gabrielle Wolf.
Event
Research