Ken Hollings

Ken has worked at the Royal College of Art since 2015. He has been involved in course planning and delivery, devising and promoting lecture programmes, giving tutorial guidance to individual students and running workshops in critical and creative writing. His practice embraces work with designers and fine artists, photographers and sound designers, composers and producers.

As well as books and publications, Ken has recorded critically acclaimed radio features and podcasts plus a series of spoken-word albums. He has presented work at the Venice Biennale, The British Library, the ICA, the BFI, Café Otto, Iklectic Lab and the Berlin Akademie der Künste.

Ken has always taken a highly experimental approach to writing as a design practice. His first publication was Theory: 140 Statements, published by Fluxus imprint Kontexts in Amsterdam in 1980. This led to his involvement with the industrial music group Biting Tongues from 1980 to 1984, resulting in a number of performances, albums and the feature film ‘Feverhouse’ released by Factory Records. During this period, Radio 1 called Ken ‘the death of rock and roll.’ Attaining an editorial post in book publishing, he worked on books with John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Hubert Selby Jr, who publicly called Ken ‘the only true editor in the English-speaking world.’ After a period of working with artists and composers across Europe, he concentrated on writing and lecturing full- time, publishing several books with Strange Attractor Press.

Ken started producing features for BBC Radio 3 in 2005 while continuing to perform at live events. Since then, he has collaborated with Aleksandra Mir, the UK Space Agency, Wellcome Institute, the Nietzsche Society and Resonance FM. His most recent spoken- word project The Howling was featured in the Loewe SS24 catwalk show during Paris Fashion Week and has recorded three albums for the Tapeworm label.