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 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