Spencer Roberts

Biography

Spencer Roberts is primarily interested in the confluences between Art, Design, Philosophy and Technology. He holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Hull, and an MSc in Interactive Multimedia Production from the University of Huddersfield. He is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, with supervisorial input shared between the department of Art and Design and the department of Philosophy.

Spencer is a practising artist whose work focuses on physical electronics as a material form of expression. He sometimes collaborates artistically with Anneke Pettican. Their work plays with spatial and temporal realities using text-based experiments. The media they employ ranges from simple subtitling techniques to custom built electronics and GPS devices. Their work has been shown nationally, and at international festivals including Inter-society for Electronic Arts (ISEA). In 2007 they presented their practice as part of the Architecture in the Space of Flows conference at Culture Lab, Newcastle. In 2008 their work was shown at Bank Art, Yokahama, Japan.

Alongside his artistic practice Spencer has developed a number of database driven online archival systems, which have a primarily curatorial focus. He has also developed sensor and actuator systems for work in commercial realm.

Teaching Responsibilities

I teach programming languages (ActionScript 3, Java/Processing, PHP, MySQL), alongside electronic interfacing and physical computing (Arduino, PIC Microcontrollers) to undergraduate and masters students. I also provide final year students with dissertation support and help to philosophically contextualise their practice.

Research & Scholarship

As a part of the Research into Practice cluster at the University of Hertfordshire, I am exploring the relationship between practised-based research and more traditional modes of enquiry.

There is a tension in formal structure of research enquiry between the broadly integrative aim of establishing a research context, and the broadly divergent, disruptive or innovative aim of saying or producing something new. In response to this I am developing a process-relational account of research that attempts to reconcile practice-based research with more traditional forms of enquiry. My research positions academic textual production as a long-durational, aesthetic process. In this sense I focus upon developing an account of writing as an aesthetic construction of a body of inter-textual relations as opposed to a logico-propositional form of reference. My research is primarily informed by the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

Research Outputs