Johnny Golding
Johnny Golding is a philosopher/poet. Head of the proto-Centre in Radical Matter: Art. Philosophy. Wild Science, situated in the School of Arts and Humanities, RCA. Professor Golding's research pays homage to entanglement, encounter, and emergence as peculiar mattering’s; a kind of ‘radical matter’ that re-inhabits Maxwell’s mad ‘cone of time’, Sharpe’s brilliant and evocative ‘wake’, Lucretius’ ‘swerve’ and the absurdist realities of Gödel’s ‘undecidable’ systematicities. The proto-Centre is home to the recently awarded Radical Matter PEEK grant (Vienna with Prof Martin Reinhart/Angewandte). Additionally, and as part of an overarching project on AiDesign with Hong Kong Polytechnic, Prof Golding is PI on two of the labs: the AiDesign Lab in Artificial and Distributed Intelligence (with Dr Sina Saleh, Head of Robotics Lab, RCA) – emphasis on embedded coding related to murmuration over swarm, empathy over binaric divides and curiosity over fear); and on the AiDesign Lab: Real World Narratives with Tom Simmons, Head of Digital Directions in the School of Communications, with emphasis on storytelling, site specific interventions, improv/composition, voice, mytho-poetics, and the circulations of real-fakes, fake-reals, contemporary fairy tales, and real world agency. Somewhere in all this: swimming with cephalopods and learning how to handle quicksand. New work includes ‘Octopussy: King of The Feminists (pirate version),’ in Viegener et al, Get Rid of Meaning (forthcoming: 2022), ‘The Courage to Matter,’ in her Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft (the Future of Knowledge Systems) with Reinhart and Paganelli (De Gruyter, 2021). Invited texts and poetic-philosophic installations include the Venice Biennale, Bogotá, Venice and Berlin. Onto-epistemological forays on AI, hive time, bodies; include: ‘Entanglement: just dreaming [the worlds] (2021); Entanglement: Just Gaming’ (2020), 4’ 33”, ‘The Photograph of Thought’ (2019); ‘Anatomy Lesson (an Open Letter, in friendship, to Sigmund Freud);’ ‘Friendship,’ (2018), ‘The 9th Technology of Otherness’ (2017); ‘Lessons in Physics,’ (2016); ‘Fractal Philosophy: Attunement as the Task of Art.’ Books/ edited journals include: The Eight Technologies of Otherness; Magic, Alchemy and Transubstantiation of the Senses; The Raw and The Cooked; The Cruelty of the Classical Cannon, (three journals as part of Zetesis: Research Generated by Curiosity, London/Birmingham). Research Lead on the PHD cluster: Entanglement; and on the MA School unit: Radical Matter – both of which are comprised of dedicated, smart, and amazing students – to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. Born in New York; lives and works in London. Studied at the Universities of Toronto and Cambridge. Likes the company of wolves, large cats, octopuses, mustangs and, every now and then, other sentient beings. Sometimes called ‘he’ or ‘him’, less often ‘they’. Usually relies on the following pronouns, often simultaneously: she/her/Sir.
