Loops of Perception
'Scorpion Dive,’ June 2025
Curators
Dr Luci Eldridge, Lecturer at Winchester School of Art
Daniela Mihai
Meg Rahaim
Nina Trivedi
Exhibitors:
Luci Eldridge
Daniela Mihai
Meg Rahaim
Nina Trivedi
Yadira Sanchez
Vanissa Wanick
Ian Dawson
Alice Casey
Dave Gibbons
Qingszhou Cai
Nana-Shireen Nduka
Jocelyn Eddy
Visual Natarajan
Monday 23rd February 2026 - Monday 13th April 2026
The National Oceanographic Centre and Level 4 Gallery in Hartley Library
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Robotic vision encompasses a wide-ranging field of non-biological sensing which includes the use of artificial intelligence in the capture, processing, and creation of data. Such technologies are shaped by human perspectives and desires. The images and data produced, in turn, re-shape human perception and understanding. We have identified the term ‘the loop’ to describe this recursive process. Image practitioners across disciplines are particularly affected by this as they work to make critical evaluations of the visual field, notably in the capture of data remotely.
This project aims to critically, creatively, and speculatively examine the impact of this loop through collective thinking and collaborative making. Through a series of transdisciplinary workshops with experts from the University of Southampton in the fields of art, science and technology we have been playfully exploring the looping relationship between robotic vision, AI processing and human understanding. We have been investigating what it means to approach these questions and making experiences from our distinct disciplinary perspectives. In sharing these and asking contributors to adopt unfamiliar ways of producing and reading material, a further loop has emerged, offering participants the opportunity to re-frame and re-shape approaches in the creation, translation, and interpretation of robotic forms of vision within their own fields. The loop circles between the human and the robotic, the visual and invisual, between the known and the unknown, the tangible and the distant.
This project has been funded by the WSI Pilot Project fund which was used to run 4 workshops which brought interdisciplinary participants together around discussion points, activities, and shared making experiences. These workshops positioned robotic vision’s ability to perform action-at-a-distance as a common starting point. Presentations, demonstrations, and experimental making and writing explored what it means to be a critical-minded user of such images, including the challenges presented by the loop. Combining the creative energies and technical skills of our participants we produced a series of low-fi sensing devices that we have used to capture and record data in the River Itchen in Winchester. The collaborative construction of imaging tools and their housings within this project has allowed conversations and questions to pivot around shared making experiences.
Pulling together specialists from Winchester School of Art, the National Oceanography Centre, and Astronomy and Physics, the project is using transdisciplinary, practical workshop methods that are aiming to challenge siloed disciplinary perspectives. Transdisciplinary work goes further than mere exposure to unfamiliar ways of seeing. It asks people to apply alien perspectives to shared intervention. Participant selection has been driven by interdisciplinarity. The variety of expertise includes telescopic spectrometry, aerial surveillance, bathymetry, planetary science, astronomy & physics, marine biology, marine geology, marine robotics, computer science, sculpture, printmaking, speculative fiction, sci-art, and moving image.
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