QUAD/FORMAT Fellowship {Evocation}

The QUAD/FORMAT Fellowship (Derby, 2024) was a two-week residency used to develop a process for working with spatial anxiety through fabricated interiors, lens-based documentation, and AI “micro-interruptions” applied to images of the room.

My reaction to travelling to QUAD and engaging with the residency caught me off-guard and was initially somewhat overwhelming, there was a re-emergence of an early adult anxiety actualised as a spatial anxiety, not claustrophobia more an embodiment of a mental threat. How a room can tighten around a body, how corners, gaps or the door itself start behaving like embodied fictions.

I decided to press into that emotional space with some sort of process, I began with an attempt at cognitive mapping: an initial survey of the room, I measured what i could reach and made a floor plan, then a fabrication (I bought in cardboard and a glue-gun). A version of the room which could encountered as outside from the inside. That externalisation mattered. It turned the space into an object and made perception something I could hold, move, manipulate and re-enter, more importantly I could imagine.

I made image documentation that produced a second layer of the space, I then introduced an AI as a co-agent by manipulating specific sites within those images as micro-interruptions, edits that placed imaginaries, they were as real as i could make them so you couldn’t tell. The point was to test how a space feels when newly charged, legible in a different way, hostile or uncontrolled, uncanny and mythic even.

Finally, I returned those interventions into the material within the room as material encounter objects, I only had time to make a couple placed into the environment they became friendly objects. This loop produced a distributed memory of the space across artefacts and iterations. The residency became an early emotionally charged ritual of later work.