Devices, traces, playful misuses
By Will Peck
This research class explores playful and collective ways of working with everyday devices by placing them in unfamiliar situations and paying attention to the traces, glitches, and behaviours that emerge. Using phones, scanners, office equipment, touchscreens, and other common technologies, the class asks what happens when devices are treated less as obedient tools and more as active participants with their own sensitivities and ways of sensing the world.
Over the week, we will make practical experiments that shift technologies away from their intended functions. Devices may be brought outdoors, exposed to unusual materials, used collaboratively, or tested in situations that reveal something of their hidden logic. Rather than focusing on finished works, the class centres on play, material interaction, and open-ended research.
The class invites students to develop small collaborative tests of their own using accessible devices and materials, and to reflect on how artistic research might open less fixed and more curious ways of living alongside technology.
This class wants to encourage experimental thinking, expand ideas of drawing and image-making, and reflect on authorship, material interaction, and nonhuman agency. It also asks how we might reconsider the role of the tool, relate differently to contemporary, black-boxed technologies, and think about human agency within technology-saturated environments. Students will be invited to consider how technology might also offer alternative ways of relating to the natural world, and how the two might coexist.
Will Peck
Will Peck (b. Norwich, UK) makes prints, videos, images and drawings using technological devices such as cameras, printers, scanners, Xerox machines and computer mice. These outcomes regard shifting relationships between machines and materiality.
He is a graduate in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and The Cass in London. Recent exhibitions include N, Draugų Vardai, Vilnius LT (2025), Performance Enhancements, Atlas House, Ipswich, UK (2025) Deebot Drawings, Centre for Recent Drawing, London, UK (2024) Night Scans - Heldenreizer Contemporary, Munich, DE (2023), Air Sensor, Lavender Opener Chair, Tokyo (2020).
At the Academy, Will Peck is conducting the one-year research project Drawing Out: Marks, Machines, Material Worlds. Through the playful misuse of familiar devices, Peck repositions them as sensing tools, opening up new ways of understanding image-making between humans, machines, and environments.
>> This research class is part of the Research Week during the annual research festival ARTICULATE.
