The Big Interview: James Coupe, Head of Programme for Photography MA at the Royal College of Art

As interdisciplinary as its other programmes, Photography MA students are experimenting with everything from analogue to neuroscience, fabrication and sculpture. Laura Robertson talks to their Professor of Art and Experimental Media, the artist James Coupe, to find out more…

A sculpture graduate whose artwork challenges our ideas of machine learning, surveillance, and exploitative online labour, artist and Professor James Coupe is pushing us to consider the human impact of Big Tech and Big Data. Since joining the Royal College of Art in 2023, as Head of Photography MA and Professor of Art and Experimental Media, Coupe has been pushing innovation amongst the students there.

Meeting on Zoom, we discussed his own artwork and exhibitions, his formative experiences teaching Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington in Seattle, and how this shaped his PhD and current teaching at RCA, as well as his birthplace in Blackpool, and the current art scene there and around England.

Below is the point where we addressed the big questions – what is photography now, exactly? To all of us, but especially to new students? How are emerging technologies impacting photography as we know it?

What kind of photographic methods are your students employing at the moment?

Well, it depends what we mean by a photographic method, you know?

You tell me! [both laugh]

There’s an interesting book by Antoine Traisnel, called Capture [American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition, 2020] which talks about our transition from a society that captured animals through hunting, to one that eventually, following the invention of photography, more often would capture them with a camera. In other words, the camera becomes a weapon of some sort, which begs the question: is it simply the act of ‘capturing’ something that makes it photographic? Joanna Zylinska has taken this in another direction in her book Nonhuman Photography (2017), discussing ways in which photographs today are often generated by algorithms rather than people.

So in our Photography MA programme, we’re seeing a very expanded idea of photography, and disrupting the traditional notion that we need a camera at all in order to take a photograph. Instead, it’s a process that can be entirely synthetic. It could be driven by datasets, with AI learning what something looks like and generating images. So photographic processes have recently exploded and opened up to involve all sorts of different things.

Beyond synthetic media, we see a real breadth in the students we have working here, some of them use analogue cameras, but others are working with performance, ecology, writing, moving image, installation, neuroscience, fabrication… they’re still framing their practises as in dialogue with photography, and benefit from having something to push up against.

That’s a good point in which to flip back to your own artwork. I enjoyed the absurdity and terror in your artwork I am not a Robot (2019, pictured above), a riff on a ‘worker cage’ from real Amazon patents, that protects (imprisons?) humans from the potential harm caused by powerful robotic machinery. What was the catalyst for this?

I see my work as more concerned with systems than with objects, which of course connects to what we were just saying about photographic processes. I think it is important to understand that artworks don’t begin and end with their frames, but rather they are part of a wider environment, which includes you. Artworks can make things visible that maybe you take for granted. They can highlight our complicity in the themes that they explore, rather than enable us to stand on the outside of them as passive observers. These general principles are important in my practise.

Do you find that putting your work in a public gallery punches through that kind of acceptance or passivity we have with tech? For example, the Captcha “I’m not a robot” test – as you said in the text for that installation, ‘unlike the Turing Test, which asks computers to convince us they are human, today, humans are perpetually asked to convince computers that they are not robots.’ Almost like Victorian labour practises, which were horrible for people, and the environment, and politically awful – here we are today, accepting and submitting to systems in order to get our Amazon Parcels.

I think hierarchies of labour, and visibility as well, are crucial for us to understand those sorts of systems. A lot of my earlier work was focused on surveillance and cameras, and how our relationships with surveillance systems create new kinds of narrative: a surveillance cinema if you like.

Things changed, maybe around the time of Edward Snowden’s revelations, with a shift in our understanding of surveillance as something that was focused on being seen by a camera, to more data-driven scenarios that are focused on collecting and comparing information. Here images become almost incidental. Instead, patterns of data, read by machines rather than people, become what matters.

This is especially relevant for online labour practises in particular, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with?

Like an electronic workforce or gig economy?

It’s one of the leading provider of cloud-based crowdworking. It is named after an 18th century chess-playing robot, which toured the Palaces of Europe and would challenge  people to a game of chess and often beat them. I’m sure you can guess how it worked.

A man hidden inside??

Hidden within, twiddling these mechanisms. So – it was a human, pretending to be a machine. And Amazon’s decision to use this name tells us a lot about labour and visibility.

In my work, General Intellect (2015), I hired hundreds of Mechanical Turk workers to make videos of themselves, once an hour, for eight consecutive hours. The workers became visible as a result, and showed us that many of them were invisible in other kinds of ways too: working from home, disabled, stay-at-home parents, and so on.

Within the context of an exhibition, audiences – and me as the artist – find ourselves in a complicated position as viewers. We are not on the outside, we can’t just be passive observers, we are part of a hierarchy of visibility, labour and privilege as we are forced to think about what it means to be able to watch these people working, and what work means today. Returning to the questions around photographic method, we can very much see a work like this as a kind of camera, but one that captures us, too.

I saw your exhibition of artists’ self-portraits [The Chinese Rooms, 2020], and that also feeds into this conversation… Paintings of people who are usually anonymous, employed by an online system to create paintings to order. And I wonder what the power-play there – between ordering work, watching the work or seeing it unfold in a gallery, critiquing (as were doing now)?

Exactly – visibility becomes a matter of privilege, as does who is looking at whom. It puts the audience in a complicated position. But then, do we want art to be an entertaining, comfortable experience, or do we want it to be one that is difficult and highlights these contradictions? Not just contradictions in terms of the relationship between the audience and the artwork, but also for me, too, as the author. I’m not neutral.

I’m working with these communities, having human conversations with marginalised people about representation, and what that feels like, what that sounds like. The Mechanical Turk workers that I corresponded with told me that the task returned a sense of agency to them, that they felt like themselves rather than just like a machine, So as the orchestrator of this artwork, I have to think very carefully about how I form the task, about what exactly I ask the crowdworkers to do. My goal was to provide some of that human agency within a system that’s fundamentally trying to take it away. That’s the challenge, but of course that is not a straightforward power dynamic.

Which leads me on to: how do you teach this? [both laugh] The theory, tech, how does that all come together in the classroom?

It’s not purely theoretical, it’s not purely practice-driven, it’s really about a research-driven approach to practice in which experimentation can go beyond just intuition and trial and error. It’s about supporting students with their ideas and helping them learn to follow the very best, most interesting, most appropriate way to explore that idea, regardless of where it takes them in terms of materials, media or site.

Do you collaborate with any external partners or venues or organisations?

Yes certainly. Imperial College London has become an important partner for a lot of the AI research that I’m doing. And our students do a number of offsite projects throughout the year. In May, we have our students participating in Offprint at Tate Modern, and also a series of four exhibitions at Television Centre in White City.

One thing that’s quite unusual about the RCA, that maybe feeds an interdisciplinary mindset, is the setup of their technical services. When I was at art school studying sculpture, we’d have two or three technicians, one in the wood shop, one in a metal shop, etc. And those are who you have to help you make your work. If you wanted to stretch a canvas down the corridor, then they might not want to talk to you about that [laughs].

But the RCA technical service staff are all shared across the whole institution, which means that if we want to have our students learn about neuroscience, or something like that, then there is somebody, somewhere, who they can talk to – whether it has a conventional relationship to photography or not.

Where there’s gaps, if we think of something that doesn’t have provision in the technical staff, then in some ways that’s a provocation to the institution to try and fill that gap. In that sense, we have this interesting reciprocity between a research-driven approach to teaching, and the ability to meet that research with the technical resources that are required for it.

What are you looking for in prospective students?

I think it’s a broad church. When it comes to what they want to do with photography, whether they are interested in analogue or digital media, darkroom processes or other expanded practices, then we have great staff and resources for them to do well – from photographers like Sarah Jones, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Olivier Richon to Edward Thomasson and Tom Lovelace who work with performance, as well as artists such as Abbas Zahedi, Lisa Chang Lee and Chooc Ly Tan whose practices span sound, installation and sculpture.

So it is a programme where students come in from many different disciplines and backgrounds, but all of whom want to explore the dialogue between Photography and the work that they are making.

I would advise prospective students to think about the materials you’re going to work with, in order to be able to find the right fit for your ideas. Tell us about the conceptual underpinnings of your practice and show us you know how to make those ideas become experiences. Who are you going to work with, what resources do you need? Let us know why the Photography programme is the right fit for you.

In your portfolio, give us a hint of the flexibility and openness in your practice, that makes you want to learn and experiment. We want to see a willingness to take things apart and put them back together again, and a willingness to exchange with the academic community that’s here. Help us to see you understand the relationship between photography and other contemporary art practises, or contemporary art as a broad idea, and what role photography plays within that.

Do you mean, for example, that you’d like students to be asking questions in their application? To be curious about not knowing outcomes, but wanting to kind of explore or push or challenge prior knowledge?

That’s a great way to put it. It is such an interesting time to be thinking about and working with images. Current estimates suggest around 5 billion photographs are being taken everyday, and of course the vast majority of those are not being printed, framed and hung on a wall. So photography opens up important conversations around reproduction, appropriation, materiality, networks, sharing, authorship, originality, consent and so on. We want students to be responding to these things and really experimenting with how we experience photography in the world today.

What would you say is a signature of RCA Photography MA?

Something that we brought into the programme over the last couple of years has been what we call a ‘practice group’ model. We have fourteen staff in Photography at the moment, working across a very broad range of areas – print, performance, moving image,  sculpture, new media, audio, etc. This reflects the dynamic range of practices that are students come in with, and want to explore when they arrive.

We wanted to find ways to support these practice areas, establish dialogue between them, and fully leverage the cross-disciplinary research and expertise of our programme staff.

So we run around ten different practice groups each year, each focused on things like ecology, materiality, synthetic media, the relationship between image and text, and so on. The students sign up at the start of the year to be in one of these groups, and meet every couple of weeks with a faculty lead for a three-hour group tutorial, field trip or workshop. My group had a great visit to the Tate to see the Electric Dreams show, and we have a workshop coming up on AI poetics.

So it’s a structure that allows some degree of directed learning to occur alongside the more self-directed studio practice that students engage with the rest of the time. It’s a model that has been very successful in challenging our students to explore new ideas, while trying to meet them where they want to be as well.

Laura Robertson

Interested in applying to the Royal College of Art to study Photography? There are scholarships available across courses: see more on the RCA website

Credits from top: James Coupe, I am not a Robot (2019), from the exhibition EXERCISES IN PASSIVITY at the Prichard Gallery, 2020. Photography MA graduates, Royal College of Art: Kun Song, One; Danilo Zocatelli Cesco, Dear Father; Gregor Petrikovič