Quantum Memory and the Unveiling of Being (2026-2027)
A touring multimedia installation investigating Welsh industrial transformation through semantic encryption and ritual interface.
Quantum Memory is an installation documenting the last generation of Welsh industrial workers — steelmakers, miners, semiconductor technicians — before their embodied knowledge disappears entirely. Participants are large-format portrait subjects; their images are semantically encrypted using Heidegger’s Being and Time as cipher, then held in a state of superposition until a visitor performs a ritual act — holding an object made from the documented industry’s materials — which triggers a slow, 60-second decryption and reveal. Sound artist Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) is creating the sonic environment from field recordings and oral testimony drawn from the communities. The work sits at the intersection of phenomenology, archival practice, and installation art — not a monument to what was lost, but a live encounter with the moment before it disappears.
Phase 1 Status: Funding applications in development (Arts Council Wales/Creative Wales, Research and Development May 2026). Margam Castle, Blaengarw Working Mens Hall, Maesteg Town Hall
Other Lives (2026–2027)
A counter-archive installation built from five fabricated biographies — lives whose futures were foreclosed by the industrial and political collapse of late-twentieth-century Wales. Each subject is given a room, a period-accurate archive of documents, photographs and objects, and a future that never arrived: a death in the Falklands, a life lost to industrial disease, a miner’s daughter, a man who left Wales, a Welsh speaker caught between language and economic need. The first subject is autobiographical — the life that would have ended aboard HMS Glamorgan on 12 June 1982. Drawing on phenomenology, archival practice and the methods of the historical record, the work asks what it means to document a person who was never permitted to exist, and treats the fabricated archive as a form of restitution.
Development Stage: Fully structured. Room installations and period archives in development. Sequenced as an Arts Council Wales Research and Development submission, September 2026.
Development Stage: Conceptual framework complete. Planned as a Research and Development submission for 2027.
The Character (2026–2028)
An AI installation confronting the figure of Thomas Picton — soldier, colonial governor, and the most contested name commemorated in Wales. Where the preservation work of Quantum Memory restores presence, The Character performs its opposite: a structural inversion that stages erasure, evasion and the managed disclosure by which institutions handle their own histories of violence. Visitors encounter a generative system that speaks in Picton’s voice — defending, deflecting, refusing — drawing the audience into the uneasy mechanics of how a culture remembers, and forgets, the men it once honoured. The work extends an ongoing enquiry into institutional impunity and the architecture of accountability.