ME, The Total Show
Exhibition
Art School
2025
Since 2021 Common Culture have been writing scripts drawn from their experiences of working at ten UK art schools. Initially written for a television comedy series, this epic project, currently running to 13 scripts and still ongoing, is both a lament for some of the good things that have been lost within UK art schools and universities, as they become more corporate and business-led, and at the same time an opportunity to revel in all the absurdities and excesses involved in both teaching and making art. These scripts are currently providing the basis for a number of works deploying graphic visual forms using AI.
Emergency Staff Meeting (comic strip) 2026
This comic strip will be published in its entirety as part of a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain on art schools to be published in 2026. It offers an introduction to some of the main characters of our fictional art school and explores the tensions, conflicts and hypocrisies arising as an art school struggles to exist within an institute run as a commercial enterprise. We see the use of generative AI, with its dataset shaped by dominant commercial cultural forces and its glitched graphics, as a fitting allegory of the mismatch between the realities and values of an art school and the corporate demands of the institute it now has to function within.
Emergency Staff Meeting (video), 2025
This AI video cartoon, initially presented at a conference in an art school in Iceland, deploys the format of an online meeting that comedically responds to the crisis-riven state of art education in the UK and the incompatibility between the identification of the art school as a place of creative experimentation and its status as a ruthlessly administered corporate business.
Rumours 2025
Rumours are short ‘Infomercials’, colliding the bland aesthetics of corporate advertising found on the screens that now populate the corridors of universities with art school rumours, gossip and news. The work satirises the promotional messaging that UK Universities are obliged to engage with in relation to the marketisation of Higher Education.
Emergency Staff Meeting (comic strip) 2026
This comic strip will be published in its entirety as part of a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain on art schools to be published in 2026. It offers an introduction to some of the main characters of our fictional art school and explores the tensions, conflicts and hypocrisies arising as an art school struggles to exist within an institute run as a commercial enterprise. We see the use of generative AI, with its dataset shaped by dominant commercial cultural forces and its glitched graphics, as a fitting allegory of the mismatch between the realities and values of an art school and the corporate demands of the institute it now has to function within.
Emergency Staff Meeting (video), 2025
This AI video cartoon, initially presented at a conference in an art school in Iceland, deploys the format of an online meeting that comedically responds to the crisis-riven state of art education in the UK and the incompatibility between the identification of the art school as a place of creative experimentation and its status as a ruthlessly administered corporate business.
Rumours 2025
Rumours are short ‘Infomercials’, colliding the bland aesthetics of corporate advertising found on the screens that now populate the corridors of universities with art school rumours, gossip and news. The work satirises the promotional messaging that UK Universities are obliged to engage with in relation to the marketisation of Higher Education.
More artworks