Jonathan Kemp – Researcher

Jonathan Kemp is a visiting reearcher at the Critical Media Lab as part of the project Shift/Register. He has a degree in Philosophy, MSc’s in Stone Conservation and Electronic Imaging and a PhD in Experimental Media Art from the University of Westminster, UK.
Jonathan has a vast practical experience in conceptualising and executing novel projects that interrogate and defract technology through various strands of materialism. These explorations of the material, theoretical and social settings of new media art are complemented by over 20 years work in stone conservation and related materials science.

Previous collaborative research includes Psychogeophysics and The Crystal World, both long term projects involving practical and aesthetic explorations into how geology, technology and psyche under/overwrite or détourn each other. These projects have been supported and demonstrated via an international network of media art organisations and heavily referenced in various journals and books in new media theory, including media archaeology.

Current research invests in gnostic approaches to technology and the earth via projects in co-constitutions of earth, gut and technology; earth-to-earth signalling systems; expanded STS-related studies of substrate materials; as well as studies in process, procedure and the framing of ‘the ecological thought’.

Jonathan is a consultant on various cultural heritage preservation projects, editor of the Journal of the Institute of Conservation and peer reviewer for publications including Springer’s Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment and Royal Society Open Science