Projects List for the NESTA Data Artist Residency Call - EOI 

Armelle Skatulski, July 2025

Projects List including:

  • brief descriptions of the work
  • who supported or commissioned it, and
  • details of where they have been seen.

Contributing researcher for a Watershed Investigations project led in collaboration with Cambridge Digital Humanities (under embargo) (2025)

  • As a selected participant at the Cambridge Social Data School, CDH (online) (June-July 2025), I was a contributing researcher on a project led by Leana Hosea, founder of Watershed Investigations, and Dr Anne Alexander, Head of Learning, Cambridge Digital Humanities. Watershed Investigations is an independent, public interest, not for profit journalism organisation providing investigations on water issues for the mainstream print and broadcast media (Guardian, BBC).
  • My participation in the Cambridge Social Data School was self-funded.
  • While under embargo until future publication, the collaborative research findings were presented on July, 1st, 2025 during an online peer review at the Cambridge Social Data School.

Generated Forest  (2024/2025)

  • An art project exploring the intersections of generative AI, data mining and natural resources extraction. It speculatively represents the conservation work undertaken by the Bezos Earth Fund in the Congo Basin and highlights the twisted circularity of a leader in ‘cloud’ computing undertaking conservation work while deploying GenAI models (Amazon Titan). The work includes generated ‘photographs’ made using sequential prompting in the Midjourney interface and text to image collage. 

An-archaeology and/of the Open Secrets of Extraction: fragments, interfaces, networks (2024)

  • An artist’s talk and presentation of practice-led research and artworks exploring the intersections of XR technology with personal data mining and natural resources extraction
  • Funded with a Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP) Grant from Arts Council England

Virtual Eyes (2024) 

  • A long form 3 channel video made using VR technology exploring the intersections of Virtual Reality, attention computing and the market of gaze data. 
  • Funded with a Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP) Grant from Arts Council England and a bursary from the IOU Creation Centre
  • Exhibited at the CultureDale Artist Showcase, IOU, Dean Clough Mills, Halifax, July-August 2024:

        https://ioutheatre.org/studio/armelle-skatulski-virtual-eyes/ 

        https://www.anarchivenow.com/virtual-eyes-2024 


Accidentology (I): Photography, the Accident and the Biopolitics of Extraction (2017-2023) 

  • Practice-led PhD project exploring the normalisation of work accidents via the study of photographic archives. It explores pre-digital logistics of information or data, linking photography, corporate archiving, capital gain and the biopolitics of extraction in the context of coal mining in France. 

Illustration work “Australians for Sale: Data Brokering and Consumer Manipulation” (2023)

  • I researched and visualised networks of personal data collection and mining for the purpose of online targeted advertising in the Australian context for a report written by an interdisciplinary team of lawyers, social policy experts and technologists.  With contributions from Dr Susie Alegre, author of Freedom to Think, Atlantic Books 2022, and Wolfie Christl, founder of CrackedLabs & Citizen Lab Research Fellow.
  • Work commissioned by the charity Reset.tech Australia.

“Virtual Reality and Abstracted Gaze” (2023)

Part of “The Art and Ethics of Data Extraction and Organisational Behaviour,” research led by Armelle Skatulski and Dr Kyle Griffith

  • Artist's talk and funded research undertaken during Leeds Creative Labs, an artist research residency fostering collaborations between artists and academics. The project focused on the risks and policy implications associated with the collection of gaze data through VR technology in contexts such as self-authentication interfaces or gazed-based interactions.
  • Funded by the University of Leeds and East Street Arts.

Two Repeated Measures Experiments (2022)

  • A Virtual Reality app developed as part of Convention House Residency. The project is an adaptation of two experiments undertaken by Facebook Reality Labs on ergonomic risks and explores how data such as gestural motion can be mined. The VR app which was developed in collaboration with a developer contains C# scripts that export ‘player’ gestural motion data to csv files and can be visualised using applications such as Plotly.
  • Funded by The Weston Culture Fund.

Data Archeogram: Mapping the Datafication of Work (2021)

  • I produced this schematic map to represent the web of ramifications that link the worker, as the active or passive source of data, to vast systems, strategies, and infrastructures of data capture, processing, storage, circulation, and monetisation (data rent), in the context of the Industrial Internet of Things. The map looks to render apparent the processes by which datafication instantiates particular power relations that lead to an increasing informational asymmetry between data collectors and datafied subjects, i.e. digital inequity based on the exclusion of subjects from ownership of the data extracted from them. 
  • A project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and The Alex Ferry Foundation as part of an RCA/AHRC Techne DTP Research Partnership.

Algorithm in Command? Automated Decision-Making and the GDPR (2020)

  • A research blog written for The Autonomy Institute exploring the risks associated with and policy implications of the use of personal data for automated profiling and algorithm-led automated decisions. The blog looks to shed light on relevant safeguards and rights enshrined in the GDPR and give leads to other policy needs. 
  • A project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and The Alex Ferry Foundation as part of an RCA/AHRC Techne DTP Research Partnership.
Using Format