Ollie Palmer

Ollie Palmer is an artist, designer, and educator whose work focuses on control systems and the absurd. His work encompasses filmmaking, installation, programming, composition and performance. He has exhibited at venues including the V&A Museum, Royal Institute of British Architects, Palais de Tokyo, Seoul Museum of Art, and Paris Opera Garnier. He holds a PhD from Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, titled ‘Scripted performances: designing performative architectures through digital and absurd machines’, which examines methodologies of working through scripted design processes and the role of the philosophical absurd as a critical tool within design.  

Teaching

Within the Masters Institute of Visual Cultures, Ollie is Pathway Leader on the Situated Design masters. He also teaches two elective modules, which are open for students from Situated Design, Ecology Futures, and Visual Arts and Post-Contemporary Practice, but the course materials are open for anyone to access and use. The first is entitled Scripted Design, and is a direct manifestation of his PhD research and research within CARADT, teaching Oulipo-inspired constrained design processes. Students perform their work in public, and the module results in a student-curated public exhibition. The second course is entitled Parallel Worlds, and encourages students to engage with the process of world-building (as seen in corporations, film studios, theatre, and more) in order to enhance and augment their existing practice. Both of these courses are taught via structured podcasts and dedicated websites which enable anyone with an internet connection to participate.  

From 2011–2014 Ollie taught master’s students in the Interactive Architecture Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, supervising projects as diverse as a machine for creating a giant floating cloud of cotton candy, inflatable ‘soft’ robotics, digital sycamore seeds, and series of slime-mould-inspired robotic frames which roam London’s parks. Teaching interests include advanced fabrication and prototyping techniques, passive dynamic robotics, programming and physical computing, as well as filmmaking and graphic design. In 2017, he authored and taught a design ethics seminar series at the School of the Art Institute Chicago.  

From 2018–19 he taught on three courses in TU Delft’s Architecture department. One had its roots firmly in futures design, asking students to envision design scenarios and architecture for the post-oil port cities of Dunkirk, Naples, and Rotterdam. Another course explored the relationship between text and image in architecture, combining technical and creative writing, and drawing skills. The third course was about pure creativity, encouraging freedom of process, thought, and medium, in an otherwise largely technical professional degree. This is something Ollie finds particularly important, as he strongly believes that creativity is achieved by acknowledging and exposing one’s own vulnerability. By emphasising the importance of this humility to students – encouraging them to acknowledge that they are the product of social and environmental forces – ultimately produces more reflexive design with greater emphasis on social responsibility.