Charlie Tweed

Personal statement

Charlie Tweed is the Co-Director of the Media Convergence Research Centre and leads the Digital Materialities cluster.

He is a media artist and practice based researcher who lectures in digital media practice and culture at Bath Spa University. 

His performative, digital and video based works have interrogated the human desire to control the natural world using various forms of technology and systems of management.

Past projects have been informed by detailed research into the development of machines as forms of human prosthetic and their relation with various theories of control from disciplinary control to informatics and the societies of control. His works utilise methods of fictional writing, appropriation, re-mixing and re-contextualisation to construct detailed proposals and parallel fictions which are often site specific and identify new relations between technology and ecology and new visions of human and non-human agency.

His current research focuses on the materialities and infrastructures of media technologies and their relation with the ecological. He is currently working on a large scale project titled 'Re-writing the overcode' which traces the complex production networks and ‘hyperobjects' of digital devices. It exposes the material origins of the black boxed device and looks at defining a new set of relations between the human, the earth’s crust and its raw materials. The outputs of this project include a large scale audio installation that manifests as a performative transmission from dead and forgotten technologies.

He has exhibited his works internationally including recent solo shows at Spike Island, Bristol and Aspex Portsmouth and group shows at Meetfactory, Prague, Whitechapel Gallery, London and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland.

He has also created performances and lectures for international conferences and events including Geologies of Value, Kingston University, The Signal and the rock at Central Art Academy, Beijing and at Arnolfini, Bristol and Strata Conference, Aberystwyth University.

He also recently completed a collaborative project with scientist Dr Darren Logan at the Sanger Institute, Cambridge which is funded by a Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award and curated by Animate Projects, London. In the project he researched the technologies and software used by Dr Logan to sequence genomes. In response he has produced a short film titled 'The Signal and the Noise' which looks at aligning the history of computer coding with human coding and looks towards potential future scenarios of hybrid computing and genome sequencing.

In the past he has also worked in a range of commercial roles focusing specifically on user experience design, digital strategy and audience research. He has worked as a freelancer and with a range of digital agencies and broadcasters.

He is currently completing an AHRC funded PHD at Kingston University.

Academic qualifications

• MFA Art Practice Goldsmiths College, University of London
• MA Digital Media Oxford Brookes University
• BA (Hons) Fine Art Oxford Brookes University
• Foundation Art and Design Chelsea College of Art.

Teaching specialism

• Media Art
• Digital Media Practice
• Digital Cultures
• Digital storytelling and Transmedia Practice
• Digital materiality
• Practice Based Research Methodologies.

Current scholarship

Current research focuses on:

• Digital storytelling, I-Docs and Transmedia practice
• The materiality of media technologies
• Media ecologies, affects and agency
• Non-human agency and its political potential in media art practice.

Other external roles

• Link Tutor for Film and Media Arts Production FdA, Weston College.