Tomas Percival

Tomas Percival is an artist, researcher, and writer. His work critically investigates the intersections of space and security. He recently completed his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he investigated the digital and epistemic infrastructures of the UK’s prison system. He is co-editor of Border Environments (Spector, 2023), Militant Media (Spector, 2024), and Common Sensing (Spector, 2025), as well as ‘The Material Force of Categories’, a special issue of the History of the Human Sciences (2025).

His research and projects have received numerous awards and grants, including from the Leverhulme Trust, the Graham Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. As an artist, Percival completed his MFA at the University of California–Los Angeles (2017) and was an artist-in-residence at SOMA Mexico City (2017) and the Jan van Eyck Academie (2021-22). As a researcher, he has held fellowships at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University (2021-22) and the Institute of Art and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2024). He was previously a Lecturer in the Centre for Research Architecture.

This project interrogates the contemporary data politics of air, focusing on how it has and continues to be mobilised as an apparatus of (in)security. The research probes how air is increasingly understood as something that must be sensed by instruments that measure particulate matter, gases, and pollutants, as well as modelled by computational systems that simulate and predict its flow, quality, and impact across spaces. This has produced a situation in which, on the one hand, government agencies increasingly mobilise the atmosphere as a biopolitical agent of control, policing, and regulation. On the other, citizen-led initiatives are mobilising air data to make collective demands around community safety.

To explore the conjecture of air, data, and (in)security, the project takes a scalar approach to investigate three contemporary examples of this intersection. The first scale is the microscale of the body and building, the second is the mesoscale of the urban or regional context, and the third is the macroscale of the atmosphere as a transboundary and planetary condition. By doing so, it aims to construct a theoretical framework that can accommodate the shifting intensities and often transboundary effects of air as security object.