FLUX 2025: More than self
Institute for Creative Futures, Loughborough University London, 4th Annual Symposium
The recent embrace of perspectives and practices traditionally overlooked within art and design’s canons, from the pluriverse to the more-than-human, has transpired in a redress of alterity and of subjectivity. Perhaps ironically, the outward expansion of creative and critical enquiry has necessitated an increasingly inward-looking gaze. This symposium will consider the convergence of more-than-human interfaces – including both multispecies and technological – and auto-ethnographic methods within current research and creative practice.
We will consider the following questions:
- Where are the boundaries between the individual and the other-than-human, when we are porous and entangled bodies, each containing multitudes?
- How do we look inward to look outward, navigating the terrain of the self without succumbing to navel-gazing?
- What potential does autotheory present for collective and multispecies liberation?
- Which methods can bring a focus to the radical otherness of species difference without sidelining social marginalisation and inequality?
- Within the interface of self and more-than-human, what is the potential for agency, and what are the limits of empathy?
FLUX 2025 Student Exhibition
This exhibition celebrates the work of our graduating students at the Institute for Creative Futures across design, media, communication and the creative industries. Explore the work on display, in a wide range of media and formats, which reflects cross-disciplinary skills and knowledge that our students gain as they engage with complex and pressing topics and issues.
Agenda
Time | Session |
---|---|
10:00–18:30 | Student Exhibition (open all day) |
10:00–11:00 | PhD session with Spyros Bofylatos (closed: ICF PGRs) |
11:00–12:30 | Angela YT Chan workshop: Weathered Radio (closed: speakers and ICF PGRs and staff). This session begins with a short collective stroll for prompted 'sound gathering', followed by a generative soundscape listening workshop. We will reflect on how personal narratives of a changing climate shape an ecology for action. |
13:00–14:00 | Lunch (catered for speakers and ICF PGRs and staff) |
14:00–16:00 | More-than-self panel discussion: Angela YT Chan, Spyros Bofylatos, Harun Morrison, Christie Swallow |
16:00–16:30 | Tea and coffee |
16:30–17:30 | Ruth Catlow in conversation with Viktor Bedö |
17:30–18:30 | Networking reception and Student Exhibition viewing |
Booking is required for external guests only.
Contact and booking details
- Booking information
- Booking is required for external guests only.
Speakers
Angela YT Chan

Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher and artist investigating climate change narratives. Her projects explore the colonial histories of climate issues and how they intersect with technology and justice movements into the present day. She often works in interdisciplinary collaboration with policy, journalism, academia and activism.
Ruth Catlow

Ruth is a UK-based artist, researcher, curator, and organiser. She is the co-founder and director of Furtherfield for art, technology, and eco-social change, founded with Marc Garrett in 1996. She is also co-Principal Investigator at the Serpentine Galleries’ Blockchain Lab. She specialises in critical group-driven discovery and playful co-creation that embraces more than human interests for fairer and more connected cultural ecologies and economies. Projects include: Live Action Role-Plays (LARPs) for planetary-scale interspecies justice; the CultureStake decentralised app for collective cultural decision-making; books such as Radical Friends - Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts (2022) and Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain (2017).
Spyros Bofylatos

Dr Spyros Bofylatos is a Tutor (Research) in the Design Products MA. He has worked in various research projects dealing with design as an agent of change. His research sprawls around design for sustainability, craft, material driven design and social innovation. He has more than a decade of experience in design education and creative facilitation having taught in Greece, India, Germany, Portugal and the UK.
Christie Swallow

Christie is an artist and designer. Their work engages with topics of ecology, technoscience and heterodoxy through with sound, installation, textiles, collaborative drawing, and archival research. Their practice forefronts engagement and co-creation, seeking to create participatory art and design processes across species barriers. Christie is currently Design Researcher in Residence at the Design Museum's Future Observatory, exploring Parakeets and Urban Ecology. They have previously undertaken residencies at the European Commission, The University of Birmingham and Hangar CIA. The 2020 recipient of the RIBA Boyd Auger Scholarship, Christie has exhibited widely and previously studied at The Royal College of Art and The University of Cambridge, where they also held a visiting lectureship.
Harun Morrison

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and an associate artist with Greenpeace UK on the project Bad Taste. He recently presented work in the group shows Sea Inside at Sainsbury Centre, and SOIL: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House. In 2024, he was in the two person show, DONO, at Somerset House Studios project space G31 alongside Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and the solo show Conjunction at VOLT, Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works. Recent group exhibitions include Sonic Acts 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous, Amsterdam, Chronic Hunger / Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania, BALATORIUM Disturbed Waters, in Veszprém, Hungary as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme and Bamako Biennial, 2020 in Mali. Harun is Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths University, London and part of the Art and Ecology Research Centre. He is also part of the faculty of the Dutch Art Institute, MA Art Praxis and Conditions in Croydon, London.
Viktor Bedö

Dr Viktor Bedö is a designer, researcher, and educator who has been contributing to the areas of critical design, service design, street game design and philosophy of embodied knowledge for over twenty years across academia and industry. Viktor’s commitment is to imagining and designing just urban futures where digital technologies and algorithmic governance of resources enable communities and the public to flourish.
Viktor is currently a Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Creative Futures, Loughborough University London, and was a Visiting Professor at the FHNW Critical Media Lab Basel (2021–2024).