Electronic Life

Team

Electronic Life brings together interdisciplinary teams for co-design, collaborative practices.
Research Directors

Ed D’Souza

Professor of Critical Practice
University of Southampton
Co-editor of the Journal of Visual Art Practice. His books include India’s Biennale Effect (2016), Barcelona Masala: Narratives and Interactions in Cultural Space (2013) and Outside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change (2012). His work has been exhibited widely, including Bergen Kunsthall 3,14 and OsloBIENNALEN in Norway (2019), India Habitat Centre in India (2019), Tate Exchange at Tate Modern in the UK (2018) and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (2014).

Sunil Manghani

Professor of Theory, Practice and Critique
University of Southampton
A Research Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, where he is one of the organisers of Turing’s AI & Arts group. He is the managing editor of Theory, Culture & Society, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Visual Art Practice. His books include Image Studies, Zero Degree Seeing, India’s Biennale Effect and Farewell to Visual Studies. He curated Barthes/Burgin at the John Hansard Gallery, and Building an Art Biennale and Itinerant Objects at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern.
Associate Researchers

Naomi Pitzer

AI Research Engineer
University of Southampton
Doctoral researcher at the University of Southampton’s Vision, Learning and Control Group, researching self-supervised audio-visual learning and robotic perception. Her previous work explored emergent communication and language evolution between artificial agents. She has led several initiatives supporting women in computing and was named a 2025 ACM-W Scholar.

Leonardo Castro-Gonzalez

Visiting Fellow
University of Southampton
Research data scientist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational social science and digital humanities. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and Visiting Fellow with the Department of Design, University of Southampton. His research combines AI, network science and large-scale digital data to develop interpretable, socially grounded tools and explore how emerging technologies can help us understand complex social, economic and cultural systems.

Cera Y.J. Tan

Media & Technology Theorist
Singapore University of Social Sciences
Her research spans critical theory, media philosophy, and the philosophy of computation. She is a book reviews editor at Theory, Culture & Society, and Managing Editor of Journal of Visual Art Practice. She forms part of the executive committee of the Association for Philosophy and Literature. Her work addresses questions concerning the ontology, epistemology, and politics of computational systems.

Nabil Mashrur

Data Infrastructure Specialist
Independent Researcher
A specialist of database design, data management and the development of efficient data-driven systems. He explores how structured data can be collected, stored, managed and transformed into meaningful information through relational databases, automation and web-based applications. His expertise includes database architecture, SQL, Python, data integration, data visualisation and interactive web systems. He is particularly interested in developing scalable and reliable database solutions that transform complex datasets into accessible insights and meaningful connections.
Doctoral Researchers

Ruojue Tang

Doctoral Researcher
University of Southampton
Her practice-led research develops AI-driven creativity-support tools for art and design students, focusing on divergent ideation and rapid prototyping. Her work aims to produce practical tools and theoretical frameworks that strengthen visual thinking and foster bolder, unexpected creative outcomes. Ruojue holds an MDes in Design Innovation from The Glasgow School of Art.

Tianhao Zhao

Doctoral Researcher
University of Southampton
His practice-led research explores how dreams can be translated into visual form through generative art and digital media, with a particular focus on how generative systems reorganise symbolic structures and extend graphic design’s capacity to represent unconscious experience. He holds a Master’s degree in Graphic Design and Visualisation from Loughborough University.

Yahui Zhang

Doctoral Researcher
University of Southampton
Her research develops the concept of algorithmic nostalgia, examining how AI-generated images construct nostalgic memory through the selection and recombination of cultural symbols. Drawing on structuralism and visual culture, she investigates how generative models re-encode cultural memory. She also maintains a long-term photographic practice alongside her research.