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. He was previously a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University and artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie. He is currently a Lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
tomas.percival@mailbox.org
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