Professor Johnny Golding
- Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art
- Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD
- Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art
- Painting MA
Johnny Golding is a philosopher and poet, holding the chair of Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the Royal College of Art.
World-leading in their field, Golding develops an onto-epistemological poetics of ‘radical matter’ that takes as its central focus the re-wilding of artificial intelligence: a practice-led encounter with contemporary philosophy, art, and the wild sciences in which attunement, entanglement, emergence and ‘sticky cohesions’ displace probability as the operative logic of generative knowledge systems.
Golding is the founding co-Head of the Radical Matter Research proto-Centre: Art, Philosophy, Wild Science at the RCA (with Dr Jonathan Boyd), leading an international network of artist-philosopher researchers. As PL on AiDesign Labs with Hong Kong Polytechnic, Golding’s flagship project ReWilding AI marks a shift from the probabilistic logics that conventionally accompany AI towards attunement, immersivity and multimodal complex adaptive systems. It brought together two practice-based laboratories: Polymorph, a distributed multi-agent generative system that retrained itself through feedback from air currents, movement, sound and electromagnetic interference, recursively reshaping its outputs in real time; and WeatherSpores, a portal-based immersive game where participants navigate AI paradigms as spores across shifting narrative, ecological and atmospheric conditions, foregrounding unknowing against the logics of prediction and control. ReWilding AI was first presented at the RCA’s Snap Visualisation Lab, then invited to SIGGRAPH Asia and the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi (British Council and British High Commission).
Recent publications include ‘The Courage to Matter’ (in Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft (the future of knowledge systems), De Gruyter, 2022), a breakthrough arts-led approach to a world now enervated by human-machine/more-than-human (moth) co-evolution and generative AI; ‘ReWilding AI: Embedding Artistic Criticality into Generative Systems’ (Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 2026); and Radical Matter: When Materialism is No Longer Enough (De Gruyter, forthcoming 2028) drawing on the internationally acclaimed two-volume journal with Martin Reinhart, radical⇌matter: Art. Philosophy. Wild Science (Salon für Kunstbuch, Vienna). Further works include The Colour of Time (RCA, 2025); Octopussy: King of the Feminists (2023/24); and the PEEK-FwF Radical Matter programme with Angewandte Vienna (2017-2022). Earlier publications include Ecce Homo Sexual: Eros and Ontology in the Age of Undecidability and Incompleteness; and The University Must be Defended.
As a Senior Tutor in Painting at the RCA, Golding has supervised over thirty doctoral completions and convenes Entanglement, a weekly intellectual ecology of lectures, workshops, and debates. Golding has served as reviewer for the AHRC, ERC, EPSRC, and FWO, and has held board positions including LEAF (MIT), Cavendish ArtScience, and EQ-Arts.
Born in New York City, Golding undertook postgraduate studies at the Universities of Toronto and Cambridge. Earlier roles include Director of the Centre for Fine Art Research (Birmingham City University); Director of the Institute for the Converging Arts and Science (Greenwich), Head of the Theory Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), and Teaching Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Golding holds an honorary Professorship in Philosophy and Imaging at Dundee School of Art.
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Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Journal Articles
- Golding, J. (2026) 'ReWilding AI: Embedding Artistic Criticality into Generative Systems' in Frontiers in Human Dynamics.
- Golding, J. and Reinhart, M. (n.d.) radical⇌matter: Art. Philosophy. Wild Science [Two-volume journal]. Vienna: Salon für Kunstbuch.
- Golding, J. (2018) 'Of the Thick and the Raw: cannibalizing the 21st century [Radical Matter: Art, Philosophy and the Wild Sciences (Untimely Meditation no. 3)]' Oxford Artistic & Practice Based Research Platform (3) online (in press).
- Golding, J. (2016) 'In the Shadow of Akimbo Corporatism: Arched Athleticism and the "Becoming-Human" of a People' in The Journal of Deleuze Studies, 10 (2). pp. 263–279.
- Golding, J. (2014) 'Ecce Homo Sexual: Ontology and Eros in the Age of Incompleteness and Entanglement' in Parallax, 20 (3). pp. 217–230.
- Golding, J. (2013) 'Ana-Materialism & the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast Visual Arts in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction' in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 19 (4). pp. 66–83.
- Golding, J. (2010) 'Fractal Philosophy: Attunement as the Task of Art C' in Theory, (cds). pp. 1–19.
Book Chapters
- Golding, J. (2022) 'The Courage to Matter' in Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft (the future of knowledge systems). Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Golding, J. (2019) 'The Photography of Thought: strategic imaginaries, corporeal hungers, and the jealous ‘hive-mind’ in D. Rubinstein’s, Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age, Routledge, London.
- Golding, J. (2019) 'From Drone-Truth to Radical Empathy: Consciousness in the Zero Zones of Time' in Daniel Rubinstein (ed). Fragmentation of the Image, Routledge.
- Golding, J. (2018) 'Friendship' in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK, pp. 262–276.
- Golding, J. (2016) 'Michel Foucault: Der Mut zur Wahrheit (1984): The 9th Technology of Otherness (a certain kind of debt)' in race & sex: Eine Geschichte der Neuzeit. Neofelis Berlin, Berlin, pp. 94–103.
- Golding, J. (2013) 'The 9th Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt' in The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. ARTicle Press, pp. 1–10.
- Golding, J. (2010) 'Fractal Philosophy: Attunement as the Task of Art' in Deleuze and Contemporary Art. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK, pp. 133–154.
- Golding, J. (2009) 'The Assassination of Time (or the birth of zeta-physics)' in Deleuzian Events: writing | history. Lit Verlag, Berlin, pp. 132–145.
- Golding, J. (2008) 'Conversion on the road to Damascus: minority report (1)' in GEST: LABORATORY OF SYNTHESIS #1. BookWorks, London, UK.
Books
- Golding, J. (forthcoming 2028) Radical Matter: When Materialism is No Longer Enough. Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Golding, J. (2025) The Colour of Time. London: RCA.
- Golding, J. (2023/24) Octopussy: King of the Feminists.
- Golding, J., Reinhart, M., Paganellli, and Coster (2022) Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft (the future of knowledge systems). Berlin: De Gruyter. (Updated from 2019 forthcoming)
- Golding, J. (2015) Zētēsis, Vol 2, no. 1: Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the Senses. ARTicle Press, Birmingham, UK.
- Golding, J. (2013) On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation. ARTicle Press, Birmingham, UK.
- Golding, J. (2013) Zētēsis, Vol 1, No. 1: The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. ARTicle Press, Birmingham, UK.
- Golding, J. (n.d.) Ecce Homo Sexual: Eros and Ontology in the Age of Undecidability and Incompleteness.
- Golding, J. (n.d.) The University Must be Defended.
Conferences and Workshops
- Golding, J. (2018) 'Anatomy Lesson (an open letter, in friendship, to Sigmund Freud)', Solitary Pleasures conference, The Freud Museum, London, 28 April 2018.
- Golding, J. (2018) 'From Drone-Truth to Radical Empathy: Consciousness in the Zero Zones of Time' at "Sliced-up ghettos of thought?" Science, art and society - 20 years from now, London, 31 January 2018.
- Golding, J. (2017) 'Diffraction, Entanglement and the Sensuous Unnatural Act called Art' at Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences Distinguished Lecture Series, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, 20 Nov 2017.
- Golding, J. (2016) 'Human Remains/Remaining Human: the exquisite problem of becoming-corpse' at The Post-Human and the Future of Humanity Visual Cultures Lectures Series, London, 1 Nov 2016.
- Golding, J. (2014) 'Ecce Homo Sexual: Eros and Ontology in the Age of incompleteness and entanglement' at Inaugural Professorial Address, Birmingham, UK, 19 Feb 2014.
- Golding, J. (2011) 'Synthetic Life: The Thinking Bot's Guide to the Universe' at Invited Lecture, Philosophy Dept, Northwestern University, USA, May 27 2011.
- Golding, J. (2006) 'The Assassination of Time (or the Birth of zeta physics)' at The Digital Arts Week, Zurich, Switzerland, 12–16 Jul 2006.
External collaborations
- (January to February 2019) Philosopher-in-Residence at the Royal Academy
