I am an artistic research practitioner whose work explores how emerging technologies reshape language, publishing, heritage, and cultural experience. My practice spans artificial intelligence, immersive and interactive media, and post-digital publishing, with a focus on how art generates new modes of knowledge and fosters resilience in times of systemic change. I have published and presented on the conditions for language and literature in relation to AI, glitch practices, and distributed critique, while also developing projects that investigate security, resilience, and cultural innovation through artistic methods. Exhibited works range from experimental uses of speed readers and optical character recognition to recursive neural networks, VR environments, and hybrid archival machines such as microfiche readers. Current initiatives include research into virtual heritage and digital twins of cave art sites, interdisciplinary labs rethinking security through immersive art, and cross-sector cultural strategies that position art as a driver of civic and ecological transformation.

Flatness and Screen-based Media in Contemporary Poetics and Art Practice

CANDIDATE Rory Cook 

Salford University (co-supervision with Dr Scott Thurston)

My current research concerns include:

• Unsecurities Lab (Security Lancaster): Advancing an art-led research environment that uses immersive media, synthetic dialogue, and scenario-building in the Data Immersion Suite to rethink security, AI, and environmental futures—producing methods, reports, and policy provocations.

• Morecambe Bay Triennial (MBT): Co-developing a research-led coastal triennial as a living lab for artists, communities, and academics to test place-based cultural infrastructure.

• Distributed Critique: Formalising critical writing methods that match the scale and complexity of networked arts and platforms, building on collaborations with Abandon Normal Devices.

• AI × Language: Working with computing and linguistics scholars to analyse AI textual synthesis as a mode of speculative foresight and cultural diagnostics.

• Reading Technologies & Publishing: Through Torque Editions, prototyping post-digital reading, exhibition, and publishing formats that interrogate how audiences encounter knowledge now.

• Virtual Heritage & VR Twins: Designing high-fidelity, research-ready digital twins of cave art sites to study cultural memory, interpretation, and resilience in immersive environments.

I teach a range of digital skills, concepts, theories, and practices on our fine art course. 

LICA's Fine Art Studio Practice modules, as one of the Digital/Performance team.

I wrote and developed my department's 101 introduction to study skills and 20-21st century cultural ideas course, called Fundamentals of Arts and Design, I co-wrote the corresponding art theories course for second years.