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Mr Damien Roach

Positions held:
  • Lecturer, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Damien Roach is a London-based artist, designer, musician, and lecturer in Digital Media and Creative AI at Birkbeck. In the years prior to joining Birkbeck in 2026, he held lecturing positions on the MA Visual Media at LCC (2019 - 2023), and Lens Based Media/Media Production at Ravensbourne University (2011 - 2020). His projects span art, design and creative direction, publishing, sound/music and audiovisual media. In 2023 under the name patten, he released ‘Mirage FM’, the first album made entirely from text-to-audio AI samples. He is currently completing his PhD, ‘Acid Realism: Aesthetic Disclosure in the Age of Generative Media and Planetary Computation’ at the Royal College of Art. His research is focused on AI, machine vision, and non-human planetarity.


    He has exhibited internationally, including the 51st Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Saatchi Gallery, recent immersive site-specific installations at SXSW London, KOKO, Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), group shows at Saatchi Gallery, The European Conference on Computer Vision (Malmö), National Communication Museum (Melbourne), ‘Prompting the Real’ (Bologna), Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK), and immersive live AV performances at London’s ICA, Tate Modern, across Europe, North America, and Japan.


    Other new commissions & projects include Google Creative Lab, Ableton/The British Library, ArtEO, creative direction/design for Caribou's live audiovisual tours and 2026’s Daphni album ‘Butterfly’ as 555-5555.


    A frequently heard voice on panels, symposia & podcasts, most recently Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon’s ‘Interdependence’, Somerset House/n-Space ‘The Algorithmic Sovereign’, SXSW’s ‘Technology, Art & Ecology’, The Wire at Cafe OTO, BBC 6Music, as well as TV interviews for BBC ‘Tech Now’ and Reuters.

    Web profiles

  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    Acid Realism: Aesthetic Disclosure in the Age of Generative Media and Planetary Computation

    2023-2027, Royal College of Art, London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) funded.

    This practice-led PhD develops 'Acid Realism', a critical artistic method that seeks to destabilise generative AI in such a way as to disclose what its opaque and seamless media actively conceals. It argues that GenAI's hyper-real output is a naturalism, a surface that makes both its own construction and the planetary system behind it appear as given and inevitable, operating as the apotheosis of what Mark Fisher termed capitalist realism. Drawing on Lukács and Brecht on realism and estrangement, Flusser’s technical imagination, and on Heidegger's conception of disclosure (aletheia), the research proposes that in the breaking of the synthetic image mid-generation, the resulting fractures disclose the constructed nature of the media itself.


    It is pursued through an installation in which live global lightning strikes disrupt a bespoke realtime GenAI system, bringing computation's material relationship and thermodynamic link to the biosphere into tangible relational form. Crucially, the project reaches past a critique of AI's material and energetic costs toward its central claim: that what finally exceeds computation is feeling - the situated, living capacity to be affected that the proto-sensorial machine can imitate but never possess. Developed through Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, parsed through Jennifer Gabrys, and grounded in analyses of planetary computation's material base, it offers a transferable method for rendering hidden systems both legible and felt. It ultimately locates, in feeling, as a capacity held by the living and decentred from the human, a ground that computation cannot reach.


    This dense cross-domain framework draws on the worlds of electron microscopy, experimental music, art history, political theory, and the philosophy of technology. Nodes assembled into its hyperkinetic orbit include the alien algorithmic sonics of Autechre, Joanna Zylinska's nonhuman photography, the mechanics of human speech mid-stutter, cybernetic feedback loops in Nam Jun Paik’s 'TV Buddha', the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act’s repetitive beats clause, Legacy Russell’s 'Glitch Feminism', a remobilisation of Clement Greenberg's reading of kitsch, and the 2015 Saint-Ghislain Google data centre lightning strike incident.

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Working with Digital Media