Laura (b.1999, she/her) is an architectural researcher and cultural practitioner based in London. Spanning essay, poetry, performance and video, her work explores the technologies weaponised by state, corporate and colonial actors to discipline, survey, securitise and pollute space, bodies, objects and stories. Interested by the disorientating effects of computation, automation and gamification on contemporary visual cultures, Laura utilises her practice as a rehearsal space for technical misuse. In doing so, she joins a growing alliance of activists, artists, coders, hackers, and technologists similarly intent on unleashing technology’s subversive and counterforensic potential. 

Laura holds a BA International Relations degree (First Class) from the University of St Andrews and a MA Research Architecture degree (Distinction) from Goldsmiths' Centre for Research Architecture.

She is the Publishing and Project Coordinator at the design studio OK-RM and its publishing imprint InOtherWords. 





















Index


01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08


Project

Reverberations
Collapse as method
How to give back a stolen glance
Stone, Virus, Rubble
Echoes
Shuffle, squeak, ssh!, shutter, click
Destruction shall be our inventory 
#europe is not my centre! Medium

Group Exhibition
Public Talk
Video
Video
Writing 
Video
Lecture Performance
Video

Laura Russell
laurarussell16@outlook.com
CV

08    #europe is not my centre

2025 Video


2 minutes, 33 seconds #europe is not my centre examines the possibilities of resistance against the museum’s digital hoarding practices that are accelerating with the widespread adoption of photogrammetric technologies. The video interrogates the OBJ (the file used to store the spatial data of 3D models generated through photogrammetry) as the museum’s latest spatial arena for staging mass spectacle of its object collections. The OBJ inherits the vitrine’s temporal and spatial demands of containment, imposing a condition of hyper-visibility, abstraction, and inertia on museum objects.

Removing the first line of vertex data from the OBJ file produces a disfiguring effect: the 3D mesh fractures as polygon faces are tessellated using the wrong geometric coordinates in the file’s code. This practice of digital defacement is applied to A’a—a statue produced on Rurutu (circa 1591–1647) and now hoarded in the British Museum’s Oceanic Collection as Oc,LMS.19. By exploiting the structural fragility of the OBJ file, digital defacement reconfigures photogrammetry as not a tool for visual optimization, but a tool for visual degradation. The video’s narrative unfolds through a cut-up method, splicing the author’s words with fragments of the OBJ’s coded language and a refrain of anti-colonial resistance drawn from the words of filmmaker Alpha Oumar Konaré and the poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip.