Tom Clark

This is a research blog for writer, researcher, some time curator and publisher and lecturer at Manchester School of Art, Tom Clark.

My research explores the infrastructures of contemporary art and curating, and how practices of critical intervention into broader infrastructural questions and contexts are coming from art, curating and institutional practices.

I am using this framework to exploring differing histories and practices of critique and intervention, comparing these against those from design, media, and policy; it’s also through this perspective that I will explore the changing cultural role of these models and develop new models of infrastructural critique and intervention from art.

This blog contains ongoing and developing thoughts and writing relating to this work, as well as documenting more specific experiments.

He works in the fields of contemporary art, curating and visual-material cultures, alternative education, and critical infrastructure cultures.

Working through a constellatory approach to curatorial practice and knowledge production, he explores how contemporary cultural practices intersect collective and ‘more-than-human’ artefacts, politics, poetics and structures of meaning making and its distribution.^[1] In practice this means examining the reconfiguration of art, curating and cultural production in relation to multiple scales of planetary infrastructures and ecosystems and their local iterations. The imaginaries, narratives, practices, matter, aesthetics and so on that constitute, stage, and unfold in these infrastructures are the material for his work.

His work includes exhibition making, public programmes, & publishing; research & writing; teaching; and research resources & toolkits. Together, this offers concepts, models, resources and opportunities for creative R&D for the interconnections and complexity of our various surrounds for thinking with infrastructure, for organisations intersected by infrastructural cultures, and for experimenting in alternatives.

You can follow me on twitter here: @tom_cl_rk

This is my full website: tomclrk.com