The great thing about art
and art school is that it refuses
to be contained.
My name is Johnny Golding I am Professor
of Philosophy and Fine Art
and I'm Research Professor and what
that means is that i'm mainly dealing
with the PhD students
and I have a sub link to the
MA students in Contemporary Art.
My practice as a philosopher is
something I backed into.
It was so critical to have an empathetic
relationship to people because it's what
makes the world a better place,
so the making of sense and how does
sense get made is done
by showing people how does this happen.
All my work is driven by curiosity,
experimentation
and the right to have freedom of speech. That
helped me really understand what it was to be
thinking about philosophy. It was never a
model, it was never a theory, it was an
inhabited way of understanding the world.
Data Loam is a project that was invented by
Martin Reinhart, and we came together to produce this
mad rethink of how information gets gathered
and how it gets archived – how one uses
the proliferation of information
to create knowledge systems. The ways in which
the Research group Entanglement or the
Radical Matter
operate at the RCA, all feed into this
research project,
but the research project feeds into
these groups as well. I don't think that
one can separate teaching from research,
nor should one.
Radical Matter was something that I
began to develop many years ago, 
from 1997 onward when I
was at the Jan Van Eyck.
Radical because one needed to be thinking
at the core of how things are put together.
One needed to have a sense of how
methods operate, and so all the courses
that I do for the MA
establish first what is this thing
called a dialectic?
What is it about this thing called
quantum physics? How did it play together? And then, how does
this have anything to do with
photography, literature, sculpture,
painting, software development and so on.
At the RCA I would put on an event for
Entanglement. The First Year it was
called Entanglement: The Carnival.
I wanted people to start thinking about
Entanglement in a very different way
than is it mathematics?
Is it artificial? Is it robotics? So we
called it 'the carnival' and we invited
Amir George, a filmmaker from Chicago
and he works in Black Lives Matter.
The work he was doing was showing how
different forms of thought become
pictures and the pictures of those
thoughts become tools of revolution.
What I hope I do in teaching is giving
people a sense
of how to be kind and intelligent.
In fact my view is that, the more
intelligent one is,
the more one is able to go in the world
without putting people down.
And I'd like to share that with people,
and also I get a lot of
energy and knowledge and logic systems
from my students.
If it's not a two-way street you're
doing something wrong.
I am very political I'm very
engaged with making the world a better
place and that
takes work, that takes rigor, it takes
commitment and dedication and I expect
that out of the students and they expect
it out of me.
you
