Felicity Hammond Lecture Performance

Join us on Saturday 18th October at 3pm for a lecture performance by Felicity Hammond as part of her installation Engine-V3.5 at Chemist.

In deep learning, convergence occurs when the relational structure stabilises: clusters stop shifting, classification boundaries stop moving, and the loss stops decreasing. During this lecture performance, Felicity Hammond will deliver Engine’s system report; a live briefing on its relational mapping process, highlighting the unresolvable tensions in the system.

About ENGINE-V3.5

As a precursor to Felicity Hammond’s V4: Repository' at Stills in Edinburgh later this year, and as an afterward to V3: Model Collapse at The Photographer's gallery in June 2025, ENGINE-V3.5 at Chemist interjects into Hammond’s computational imaging feedback loop as a moment for reflexive re-classification. It explores how optical, material and computational data, collected from the previous three chapters of ‘Variations’, Hammond’s PhotoWorks commission, can be funnelled into an imagined configuration - a structure of loading bays, printouts and storage systems - to house data-as-research. Reinterpreting the relationship between prompts and images through the lens of AI and asking what happens when the image, not the prompt, comes first?

In this iteration, the exhibition introduces Engine, an imaginary corporation that specialises in the intelligent classification and management of both physical and digital data. Hammond will use Engine's fictional flagship platform, E-V3.5, to map the full extent of the physical and digital trails of the previous variations of this project. The resulting inventory will be produced through Engine's advanced system: one which mimics machine classification via human cognition.

Built over the course of four process-driven weeks, ENGINE-V3.5 begins by positioning the image not as a result but as a provocation: a starting point from which archives are built, knowledge systems recalibrated and new forms of inquiry and meaning might become visible. The image is approached as blueprint, as residue, as ghost file; its data, manifesting through physical, tangible objects,and traces that infer authorship and disclose intentionality. In a process that is both reverse engineering and supervised classification, ENGINE-V3.5 breaks from cloud-based computational systems that are blackboxed and inaccessible, giving precedence to a process where data re-emerges as something weighty and precarious. Stacked, stored, reconfigured in space. These materialisations expose hidden labour and extractive economies that underpin digital production, while simultaneously opening speculative pathways for reimagining how archives might be built and sustained.

The exhibition becomes both a warehouse and a testing ground, a place where images prompt architectures, where prompts generate image collapse, and where the flows of digital culture are made graspable, fragile and strange. ENGINE-V3.5 invites access to a living, shifting repository where images are not endpoints but coordinates in mapping how digital photographic material makes its journey from mineral to pixel; and from beneath the Earth’s surface to the screen.

ENGINE-V3.5 is the first project in Chemist & Rebecca Edwards’s ‘Conversations with AI 2’, a series of exhibitions and events unpacking the profound influence and repercussions of artificial and computational intelligence on the psyche and workflows of practitioners.

Variations is commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, a unique biennial opportunity that supports a mid-career artist to create and exhibit a new body of work.

Felicity Hammond (b. 1988 in Birmingham, UK) is an artist and educator based in South London. She is a senior lecturer on the MA Photography programme at Kingston University. Hammond received an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014 and a PhD in Contemporary Art Research from Kingston University in 2021. Institutional solo exhibitions include V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers’ Gallery, 2025 and Remains in Development at C / O Berlin and Kunsthal Extra City Antwerp, 2021. She has exhibited her work in international group exhibitions at museums and galleries including Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal, Higher Pictures New York and Saatchi Gallery London, amongst others. Hammond has worked on a number of high profile public art works, including a 30 metre site-specific work for Photo 2021 Melbourne, Australia and a large scale installation for Colchester and Ipswich Museum, UK. Hammond’s work has received and been nominated for a number of awards, including being the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks Fellowship (2023) and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (longlist, 2019). She was awarded the Lumen Art Prize (2018), FOAM Talent (2016), and the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award (single image winner, 2016). Hammond’s first book, Property, was published in 2019 by SPBH Editions.