The Current Team is an interdisciplinary / intercultural collective. Our four core members – Provides Ng, Eli Joteva, Ya Nzi, and Artem Konevskikh – are architects / researcher / artist / CG specialist / engineer / data analysts / particle physicist / maker from China / UK / Bulgaria / USA / Russia. ‘The Current Team’ also indicates its broader network of creative commons / collaborators from all around the world (https://www.current.cam/evolutions), where the virtual space is, at the same time, what enabled our cross-territorial collaborations and what constantly reminds us of the importance of treasuring the affective values from physical interactions. Thus, our team focuses on the ‘work’ as much as the ‘working’ – the processes by which we can create / design / produce / research / learn together across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The Current Team and its works does not set apart from the rest of the world, but rather, it bridges, by setting a virtual mediated ground that enables such aggregation of efforts.
With the emergence of planetary computation, data analytics, and algorithmic governance, the Current Team seeks to bridge communication between digital technology, its folk ontology, and their impacts on urbanism. The team employs visual-driven analytics to investigate contemporaneity and speculate on our future. They consider visual aesthetics not as supplementary to happenings, but possess intrinsic cultural values that are uncertainly measurable with existing institutional metrics.
The Current Team works with creatives worldwide. They comprehend across cultural and disciplinary landscapes to knit a global network of connections. The team feels the urgency to amalgamate the distributed social and technological capacities into an operable soft infrastructure that complements our physical architectures. Along these lines, the team serves to realise designs that may help to aggregate the efforts of the many, and delineate how it might transform our proximate futures.
Eli Joteva is a Bulgarian intermedia artist based in Los Angeles. With a practice rooted in photography and digital media, her work traces the translations between material and virtual planes in an effort to re-imagine the experiences of both human and other-than-human bodies. Influenced by contemporary research in the fields of quantum mechanics, neurophysics and machine vision, she investigates organic and computational memory systems in relationship to imaging technologies of the past and future.
She is currently artist in residence at STEAM Imaging III with Ars Electronica & Fraunhofer MEVIS, lecturer at houdini.school, VR curator at SUPERCOLLIDER and cofounder of current.cam.
Provides Ng was trained as an architect and a researcher. Her research concerns the emergence of digital tools and their impacts on architecture and urbanism. Her current research discusses how large-scale computation prompts a ‘preemptive urbanism’, where blockchain and machine learning helps to facilitate a computational data market that transforms Digital Twins into digital assets, and guides our design strategies. In her design work, she experiments with multimedia narrative as a control and communication technology, which expands the audiovisual spectrum of architectural representation.
Provides is currently teaching at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), where she also received her distinction in Master of Research (MRes) on Digital Theory and Architecture.
Alexey Yansitov is an artist and engineer from Moscow. He studied at the Robotics and Complex Automation Department of Moscow State Technical University and at the Moscow Contemporary Art Institute. Alexey is a member of artist collective APXIV, a spatiotemporal structure in the constant process of transformation, and is also a lead 3D Animator in CGF studio.
Artem Konevskikh studied computer science and then applied this knowledge in the field of experimental particle physics by developing data acquisition systems and doing data analysis for CERN and Institute for Nuclear Research RAS. He is also one of the founders of the makerspace Physics Kunstkamera in Troitsk, Moscow, where he teaches advanced technologies for rapid prototyping and software development.
Artem is currently working at Strelka KB, where he is developing urban analysis tools as well as collaborating on artistic and research projects to implement artificial intelligence and neural networks into the design processes.