Elfed Alexander Samuel

Elfed Samuel is a digital artist and architectural designer, working at the intersection of applied ecological research, the social act of architecture and emerging tools of digital simulation and film-making.

Elfed’s work at the RCA has centred around research into the material cultures, social structures and environmental actions that will allow humans to meet the challenges of the climate crisis; developing a lightweight construction system from a biofuel waste-based material - OilCast, as well as studying the psychological, social and systemic barriers to living more sustainably, which culminated in his dissertation - Gameful Degrowth.

Elfed received a first-class degree in Architecture from the University of Nottingham in 2018, before joining the RIBA Gold Medal-winning cooperative, Cullinan Studio, working across a number of social housing, healthcare and educational projects.

Throughout his MA, Elfed has been designing sustainable housing for the small Yorkshire-based practice Samuel Kendall Associates, with two schemes he led now reaching practical completion.

Working through digital animation has become central to Elfed’s practice at the RCA, leveraging the immersive potentials of Unreal Engine to explore, develop and showcase architectural narratives.

This mode of practice has culminated in a 10-minute animated film - Kykrdale_Animate Valley; a thesis which explores a body of emerging agroecological research.

An animated work of climate fiction, Kykrdale_Animate Valley explores the use of digital ecosystem modelling as a platform to project restorative modes of posthuman architecture, cultivating new ways of seeing, engaging, and understanding natural systems.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

9:58 minutes

In the shadow of a rapidly degrading biosphere, restructuring our relationship to the natural world, in recognition of our ignorance of its systems of agency, temporal rhythms and the evolutionary lineage we share within it is critical.

"temporal resolution may play a much more important role in sensory ecology than previously indicated, in particular, because of its universal effects relating to body size" _Metabolic rate and body size are linked with perception of temporal information, Animal Behaviour, 86 (2013)

Animating the trophic actions of animals now absent from UK ecosystems, such as the rumination of the wild boar; provides a point of recognition and study into how we can foster similar actions through designed interventions in the landscape.

The division of subject and object is becoming increasingly blurred, with our tools and surroundings taking on greater digital and mechanical animacy every day. This places the study of system and agent behaviour at the heart of how we interact with the world.

Enhancing the vitality of our natural world presents not only a robust method of carbon capture, but also provides the opportunity for an expanded field of applied ecological research; studying, mapping, and projecting the restorative processes we still know very little about as a holistic system.

“Elephants’ habit of snapping or uprooting trees could explain why species such as oak, ash, beech, lime, sycamore, field maple, sweet chestnut, hazel, alder and willow can regrow from the point at which the stem is broken…Trees that can survive the attention of elephants often come to dominate the places in which the animals live: the ability to coppice confers powerful selective advantages.” _Feral, George Monbiot, p.91

Once a thriving 10,000-year wildwood of Oak, Birch, Elm and Alder; the Yorkshire Dales have been bereft of their ecological vitality by many millennia of anthropogenic damage; frozen in their pastoral guise by a legacy of intensive grazing, enclosure’s cultural erasures, and the picturesque tendencies at the heart of landscape conservation, national park status and mass tourism.

This deepened engagement challenges our societal position to conservation, agricultural practice, and the insular culture present in landscapes, which have been rendered completely anthropogenic, and near lifeless.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

1:33 minutes

agro-ecology Animals Animation Biodiversity Cli-Fi Climate crisis Forest Nature Neuroscience Permaculture Posthumanism Simulation

In recognition of the landscape’s dramatic potential for cultural and ecological upheaval; the Muker village fete becomes a forum for the discussion, practice, and implementation of restorative ecological ideas, debating the future of dale and heath, scree and scar, such that a growing vitality of landscape, is matched by the emergence of a regenerative Dales culture.

The 60th anniversary of the Fete takes place beneath a diverse floral canopy of Swaledale wildflowers, including eyebrights, hedgenettles, and wood-cranes bills; harvested from the balks and ruderal edges of the low plains of the dale, the perennial cycles of different species providing variation in the canopy’s hue each year.

Sættbǫð_Village Fete_2085, Digital Animation

The familiar tropes of agricultural fairs that sought to showcase aspects of ecology, bested and manipulated by man are absent. Shoebox gardens showcase actions that nurture biodiverse ecosystems, the reintroduction of apex predators being one such example.

The second, more-permanent areas of the fete’s structure lie within the timbrel vaulted cairns; formed from the long-defunct drystone walls that once spread through the area. The cairns act as a semi-conditioned exhibition and gathering space during the fete.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

1:37 minutes

Animals Cinematic Climate crisis Digital Worlds Ecology Empathy Festival Landscapes Nature Posthumanism Speculative Futures Unreal Engine

Recognising the degrading health of their Dale’s ecosystem and their declining viability as a productive rural community, the people of Muker foster a working group of farmers, ecologists, and gardeners seeking to implement emerging agroecological methods, reconciling the importance of greater biodiversity levels with the need for a more robust, regenerative food supply, as well as developing new ways of valuing, understanding and engaging with the surrounding ecosystem.

A derelict skelbuse, north of the village is taken as their site of collusion, providing the origin from which they plan their interventions in the landscape.

Under the staunch landscape conservation of the National Park Authority, the group begin confined to speculating through a new method of digital ecosystem modeling, a platform to test, analyse and project the outcomes of different cultivation practices.

The digital realm is known locally as Kykrdale, a speculative mirror for the many potential futures of the surrounding landscape. This ecosystem twin provides an interface allowing local community members to understand, evaluate and postulate alternate futures for their Dale.

Kykrdale’s speculative landscape allows the study, analysis, and emulation of diverse, productive ecosystems; recognising the interdependency of the natural agents within them, those fixing nitrogen into the soil, accumulating and sharing deep-rooted nutrients, providing specialist nectaries, shelter, shade, and danger to other agents.

The concealed nature of many of the processes essential to ecosystem health are revealed through vignettes highlighting different agents’ roles and actions; such that the conditions within which these processes thrive can be replicated and enriched through human action.

The group’s digital ecosystem platform allows the exploration of many potential cultivation futures; between these, lucid conditions of space emerge as shortcuts between each outcome, thresholds to each biome leaving traces within this interstitial territory.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

2:28 minutes

Agriculture Cinematic Community Digital Worlds Ecology Empathy Landscapes Nature Perception Posthumanism Speculative Futures Virtuality

Understanding trophic processes and the gaps within them, be that from extinct predators, a lack of mature habitat, or absent microclimatic conditions provides a motive and rationale for human intervention in the ecosystem. The making of allogenic structures provides a shift in the position of the human agents from heuristic solutioneers to open-ended stewards, favouring overall health over a single optimised output.

Emboldened by the Environment Act’s mandate for net biodiversity gains, the working group develop their first 3 structures of allogenic emulation. The overstory mast reflects the observation of the role mature trees play in the provision of shade and shelter from harsh wind and rain to smaller fruit-bearing trees, which develop faster, in time nurturing further saplings of their understorey.

Myrksteikja_Overstory Mast_2030, Digital Animation

In the absence of the mature woodland necessary to culture this productive cycle, the masts play a surrogate role, tempering micro-climatic conditions through the height, spread, and pitch of their leaves.

As the microclimatic conditions provided by the masts are restored through a mature, fruit-bearing canopy, the masts can then be migrated to their next potential site.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

47 seconds

agro-ecology Animals Cinematic Climate crisis Digital Twin Ecology Landscapes Nature Non-Human Posthumanism Speculative Futures Virtuality

DraumrGarðr_Server Garden_2035, Digital Animation

Reconciling the contradiction of the ecosystem’s digital abstraction, a highly energy-intensive process, in order to understand and enhance its vitality becomes the focus of the group’s second intervention; creating a space to host their necessary digital infrastructure whilst leveraging the ambient heat of the Kykrdale servers to achieve a productive microclimate.

This allows a mix of less-hardy varieties of herbaceous perennials to thrive, both on the ground around the structure and within the building’s passive heat sink pool, which supports varieties of edible lilies and water spinach.

The servers’ presence forms a new sheltered gathering space for both human and non-human occupants, a structure hosting and hosted by the landscape.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

62 seconds

Cinematic Climate crisis Digital Worlds Ecology Empathy Foraging Garden Landscapes Nature Posthumanism Speculative Futures Virtuality

The group’s third intervention capitalises on the river Swale’s capacity to foster greater areas of wetlands habitat through an allogenic bridge, emulating the effects of a beaver’s dam.

The bridge’s sinuous path maximises the structure’s surface area in plan, in the relief of its walls, and in the undulating topography of the surrounding landscape, sheltering new ponds, inlets and islands; all serving to enhance the diversity of microclimates around the structure.

The structure's ponds support a breadth of edible aquacultural plants such as bulrushes, cresses, saxifrage, and sweetgrass.

The bridge does not serve as a new crossing for humans but offers sheltered spaces around and beneath it as well as an emerging circular raised walkway, permitting new views of the surrounding wetland habitat.

Ætabrygg_Allogenic Bridge_2040, Digital Animation

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

97 seconds

Animals Biodiversity Bridge Climate crisis Ecology Empathy Landscapes Nature Permaculture Posthumanism Speculative Futures Virtuality

As rapport with the platform grows, divisions of abstraction and immersion blur, allowing a lucid awareness of trophic processes to emerge.

Kykrdale_A Landscape of Trophic Abstraction, Digital Animation

Recognising the unseen actions within cultivated territory; the transfer of nutrients, and the accumulation of subsoil life, becomes a nocturnal collective activity of the Swaledale community, congregating after dusk within their digital ecosystem to discuss the potentials of their landscape.

Members discard their human modes of being upon entry, adopting parallel identities as agents directly engaged in the natural world.

Medium:

Digital Animation

Size:

65 seconds

Abstraction Climate crisis Ecology Ecosystems Empathy Immersion Landscapes Nature Simulation Speculative Futures Surreal Virtuality

Elfed Alexander Samuel

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Royal College of Art