About

"This practice-led PhD research recontextualizes Elias Canetti’s 'Crowds and Power' (1962) as a foundation for reimagining the crowd through a more-than-human lens, where bodies merge with technology and ecology, proposing a new grammar of the crowd. Understanding the crowd as a verb, simultaneously action, occurrence, and state, this thesis positions it as an emergent onto-epistemological object. It employs a crowd-as-process approach, where states of being and emergence operate within fluid, recursive feedback loops. Situated at the intersection of fine art and philosophy, this research redefines the crowd as a learning, anarchic, and fluid entity, contributing to contemporary debates on collective action, intelligence, complicity, and agency.

Established crowd theories emerged from early modernist frameworks. This PhD seeks to reposition the crowd within more-than-human perspectives (Abram, Merleau-Ponty), integrating technological and ecological urgencies to develop new readings of the social and the crowd’s centrality within it. The project embraces new relationalities (Borch), reframing the crowd as a space of hospitality, conviviality, and the acceptance of strangerhood (Canetti, Derrida), rather than a mob-in-waiting (Freud, Le Bon). Additionally, through its focus on the aesthetics and manifestations of crowd dynamics, this research contributes new approaches to contemporary social practice (Bishop, Bourriaud, Latour).

The investigation begins with a posthuman re-staging of William Kilburn’s daguerreotype, 'The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10, 1848'. Drawing on Barad’s intra-action, Bennett’s vital materialism, and Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, the research incorporates drawing, photography, and sculpture as methodological testing grounds for mapping the affective reverberations of the crowd (Wall). Additionally, data and algorithmic expansions transform site research, enabling a relational mapping beyond anthropocentric frameworks. By re-staging and recasting this historical moment as a crowd-event, the project positions the crowd within a continuum of ecological, material, and social histories, expanding how collective futures might be imagined."