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
Prison Records
Research project
Date: 2019-25
Institution: Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London
Prison Records investigates how structures of assessment, management, data, and risk have reshaped the contemporary prison system in England and Wales. This interdisciplinary and practice-based project focuses on the Offender Assessment System (OASys), a risk assessment tool and database that records incarcerated individuals such that institutional decision-making and behaviour governance can be undertaken. The research begins by scrutinising the production of these profiles, exposing how the logic of risk and need calculation leads to forms of criminalisation and individualisation. It reveals how these records generate prescriptive and punitive pathways for those assessed. Next, the project interrogates the impact of the various conditional pathways established by these records, such as offending behaviour programmes and interventions, exploring how the system compels imprisoned individuals to conform to the version of themselves constructed in the file—reshaping behaviours so they become intelligible and manageable within the framework of technical oversight. The thesis culminates in an exploration of the day-to-day modes of resistance, negotiation, friction, and refusal that have emerged in response to such recursive modes of capture and oversight. Methodologically, this research is grounded in a practice-based approach. It involves collaborating with formerly incarcerated individuals to request and review their prison records and engage in an experimental interview process that results in the creation of a series of audio works and counter-narratives.
Research