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
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