Somerset House Studios: Ted Hunt

Somerset House Studios resident Ted Hunt is engaged with the critical task of returning Homo Sapiens (Latin: wise man) to Sapience (wisdom). Seeing the human brain and natural intelligence (NI) as the most single most advanced technology at our disposal, his work proposes a genuine point of nano-resistance to the market driven march of Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Bots / Robotics and 'Smart Thinking'. Recently graduating from the Royal College of Art he studied MA Design Interactions under Professor Anthony Dunne and has since sought to continually domesticate the notions of speculative and critical design practice with a broad public audience. Ted has worked in varying forms and formats with individuals and organisations including; Artangel, Alain de Botton, ICA, Royal College of Art, ReachOutRCA, Southbank Centre, Dulwich College, Fife Contemporary Art & Craft, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Cube Design Museum, Vitra Design Museum, MAK Vienna and the Vienna Biennale 2017.

Ted is increasingly concerned with what he perceives as a seismic social shift that has seen individuals and citizens re-delegated as monolithic hordes of mass 'users'. As such he intends to dedicate his two year residency at Somerset House Studios to advancing the alternative non-linear search engine platform 'else', and the associated speculative investigation Modes of Thinking. Comparing the modern single button search engine to the same limitations of conventional photography that David Hockney labeled as akin 'to looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops', Ted will attempt to decentralise and redistribute the default narratives of technological progress offered by the titans of Silicon Valley with a parallel nano-ideology intent on creating space for divergent alternatives and new perspectives.