This week we journey back to 2011 to look at a multimedia installation on Sylvie Plath by Arts & Computational Technology PhD Chris Girard.

Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus is an experiment in new media poetics that strategically re-imagines the authorial identity of renowned confessional poet Sylvia Plath.

By presenting collaged audio and video recordings of audio and places associated with her poetry, the project radically questions the power traditionally associated with the author.

Plath continues to be cast as a depressed wife and mother; the imperatives of this role still weighing heavy upon the production of her biography and the reception of her work.

The collaging of audio and video clips reembodies Plath as an omnipresent ghost and shifts meaning away from an exclusive association with the tragically depressed, the pathologized Plath.

• Read Chris Girard’s final doctoral thesis Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus

Chris Girard is now an experimental collage poet based in Los Angeles whose work explores embodiment and identity. Visit Chris’ website

This week’s Throwback Thursday post revisits a 2009 project by PhD student Rui Filipe Antunes, PhD Student.

xTNZ is focused on the exploration of the possibilities of using artificial life in the context of art. The aim was the development of an ecosystem based on a real-time three-dimensional PC based system sustaining a “living” virtual environment.

The entities populating this virtual world have been designed to be active and responsive. They behave and interact with each other, they reproduce according to eventual interactions and they change their own properties (such as visual appearance or dimensions). An unpredictable visual representation of the world will emerge, shapes will evolve in time according to the creatures interaction.

All creatures textures and sounds are initially from human origin (such as bones or muscles tissue images as the creatures skin or kissing or chewing sounds as the creatures screams)

Rui Filipe Antunes has undertaken a significant number of curatorial projects and exhibitions, including the Festival of Digital Arts at Watermans (2012) and a solo exhibition at London’s Tin Shed Gallery (2013).

Every Thursday, we are going to showcase a staff and student research from the past few years. This week we revisit a project described by Marco Klingmann (Msc Cognitive Computing) in 2009.

This is a simulation of agents doing “rock gathering on mars”. The agents have to find and collect rocks in a bounded environment and carry them to the mother-ship. The environment consists in collectable rocks (samples) and immovable obstacles. Each agent can only carry one rock at the time. Samples are clustered in certain spots.

The agents do not know the location of obstacles and samples in advance.‌The simulation scenario and agent behaviour rules were adapted from Steels, L. (1991). “Cooperation between distributed agents through self-organisation”.

The agents are based on subsumption architecture (cf. Brooks, R.1986. “A robust layered control system for a mobile robot”.)

Marco Klingmann is now an interaction designer and app developer working in Switzerland. Follow him on Twitter