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
PhD 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
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, and 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
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
Security Vision
Leverhulme Trust-funded Visiting Research Fellow on Security Vision (ERC project)
Date: October 2021 - October 2022
Institution: Institute of Political Science, Leiden University
Further information here
How do technologies of computer vision work in practice in the field of security, and what are their ethical and political implications?
Vision, understood as the capacity to see and make sense of what is seen, is increasingly being delegated to autonomous computer systems, which influence how human operators determine suspicious behaviour. We currently lack an understanding of how these technologies impact governmental and private sector actors, their decision-making, and their accountability, as well as the fundamental rights of those who are targeted. This project addresses these challenges through an innovative theoretical and methodological framework that investigates the theoretical, empirical, and political implications of the development of computer vision in the field of security. In order to carry out this task, the project builds on and advances debates at the intersection of critical security studies, science and technology studies, and visual ethnographic practices.
Principal Investigator: Francesco Ragazzi.
Research