PERFECTION / SPECULATION in conversation with Natasha Vita-More at the Vigeland Museum, OsloPhoto Katharina Gellein Viken & Charles Kriel
Adam Peacock is a research-led artist and designer whose work examines how digital infrastructures shape identity, desire, and behaviour within contemporary culture.
Working across art, design, and applied research contexts, his practice explores how algorithmic systems and platform economies shape subjectivity, desire, and social value under optimisation logics.
Adam’s work is developed through exhibitions, cultural programmes and extended through strategic engagements, long-term collaborations, and commissioned research with cultural, academic, and commercial organisations.
THE VALIDATION JUNKY at RAM Gallery, Oslo Adam Peacock Biography 2026 – 508 words
Adam Peacock (B. 1988 Leeds, UK) is a London- and Oslo-based artist, designer and researcher whose work examines how digital and algorithmic infrastructures shape identity, desire and behaviour within contemporary culture.
Trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, he completed an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art (2012–14), where he developed the speculative research framework The Validation Junky. Initiated during this period and continuously expanded since, the project applies architectural systems thinking to the contemporary body, investigating how platform economies, AI-driven classification and optimisation logics produce new forms of subjectivity and social value. Peacock’s early career in large-scale architectural practice informs this approach. He worked at Heatherwick Studio on the Azabudai Hills development in Tokyo, at Amanda Levete Architects on the V&A Exhibition Road Quarter in London, and at WilkinsonEyre on CIBC Square in Toronto, before leading concept design strategy packages for NEOM’s Trojena region in Saudi Arabia. Architecture provided a systems-based methodology that now underpins his research into technological culture.
Key projects developed under this lens include Genetics Gym (comissioned by the Fashion Space Gallery, UAL), which examined the body as a speculative site of bio-engineering and optimisation; Machines for Automating Taste (comissioned by the Visible Futures Lab, School of Visual Arts, New York); and Perfection / Speculation, a collaboration with PRAKSIS Oslo, the Vigeland Museum and queer nomadic club and conversational platform Karmaklubb*, convening international discourse around biotechnologies, new media, constructs of beauty and enhancement culture. His work has been exhibited and presented internationally, including with Tecnológico de Monterrey, Trinity College Dublin, Science Gallery Melbourne, Product Innovation Apparel Milan, Fashionclash Maastricht, and the Royal Scottish Academy Edinburgh. His research has been recognised by awards and honours, including the Lumen Prize, S+T+ARTS at Ars Electronica, and the Robert Garland Treseder Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, featured by the BBC and published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Alongside his artistic research practice, Peacock applies speculative and systems-led thinking in strategic contexts, shaping organisational narratives and identity frameworks across mobility, fashion, urban and technological futures. Collaborations with Audi, Stella McCartney, Accenture, and the Science Gallery Network have translated cultural analysis into applied strategy, with his award-winning creative strategy work with FIAT Centro Stile in Turin informing the conceptual positioning and production narrative of the electric FIAT 500.
Parallel to his practice, Peacock has held visiting lectureships internationally at the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), ArtCenter College of Design LA, Melbourne School of Design, and the School of International Art Beijing, guiding interdisciplinary students across architecture, fashion and speculative design to critically engage with technological futures.
He is currently an ESRC-supported doctoral researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His PhD project, Tools for Navigating AI-Integrated Subjectivity, examines how AI-driven platforms such as Grindr, Scruff and Instagram produce new formations of queer masculinity through data extraction, optimisation and algorithmic visibility. The research brings together visual culture, computational methods and critical AI studies to develop both theoretical analysis and practice-based outputs.