As part of SATA Summer School’s 2025 programming, the lecture “Pattern (Re)Cognition” gathered four interdisciplinary speakers—Professor Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, Dony Cheng, Dr. Royce Ng, and Professor Miu Ling Lam—to explore how art can intersect with research and technology to engage with history, social justice, and sensory experience. Hosted by Pat and Kachi, the session traced imaginative and research-driven approaches to artmaking, touching on themes such as urban memory, virtual embodiment, political erasure, and speculative design. The event invited participants to reflect on how artistic practices can reshape our perception of place, community, and the invisible forces shaping our world.

Professor Gareth – Brutalism, Memory, and Forensic Fictioning

Professor Gareth presented his PhD research on the demolished Birmingham Central Library, reinterpreting brutalism not just as an architectural style but as a social methodology. Through “forensic fictioning”, he created digital reconstructions and speculative archives from 3D-scanned concrete fragments. These materials became teaching tools, public resources, and exhibition artifacts, exploring how architecture can persist digitally after physical demolition. Gareth’s work reflects on public memory, urban transformation, and the ideological loss tied to modernism’s civic promises. His practice asks how cyberspace, fiction, and collective acts like “eating the library” can shape new forms of engagement with lost places.

Dony – Urban Disorientation and Terracotta Landscapes

Dony shared their painting and digital media practice centered on urban disconnection and sensory rediscovery. They reimagine cityscapes by erasing photographic details and reconstructing historical topographies using GIS and Unity. Their project Terracotta Landscape visualizes pre-urban Hong Kong terrains, contrasting today’s vertical density with expansive, imagined pasts. Dony also explored light as a perceptual phenomenon, using Cinema 4D to recreate atmospheric conditions inspired by Edward Hopper. Their installations combine cubes, straight lines, and artificial plants to critique urban rigidity and reconnect viewers with embodied experiences. Their work invites poetic encounters with space, memory, and the limits of digital abstraction.

Dr. Royce – Fieldwork, Fiction, and Nonhuman Ethnographies

Dr. Royce introduced their art-research practice through the metaphor of mycelium and mushrooms, where deep research underpins visible artworks. They shared collaborative projects like the “Somali Peace Band”, exploring transnational refugee experiences, and “A Season and Shell”, which traced illicit abalone trade routes from Somalia to Hong Kong and Switzerland. Royce’s trilogy of works delves into nonhuman perception, including “What Is It Like to Be a Virtual Bat?”—a VR project simulating animal embodiment. By blending anthropology, sensory ethnography, and speculative storytelling, they explore political responsibility, empathy, and the liminal spaces between human, animal, and machine.

Professor Miu Ling Lam – Light, Censorship, and Computational Media

Professor Miu Ling Lam presented research-based media artworks that merge technology, optics, and political consciousness. In “Streaming Nature,” she used networked audio to bring remote environmental soundscapes into urban spaces, while “Erase the Murmur” used infrared reflectography to reveal hidden political graffiti, referencing censorship in Hong Kong. Her computational light painting and volumetric fog projection projects experiment with robotic movement, narrative perspective, and material transformation, often layering historical, cultural, and political meanings. Through these works, Lam reconsiders how invisible forces—whether social or optical—shape perception, highlighting media art’s unique capacity to reflect and intervene in contemporary realities.