Simone Pellegrino is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he studies the hegemonic character of chance and randomness in an array of cultural practices in contemporary capitalist democracies.
From the phenomenology of luck, fate and (mis)fortune in mainstream and online media, to the peculiar functioning of LLMs in generative AI whose disorder peculiarly turns the machine into an oracle, he draws on ethics and philosophy to fathom the extent to which the equal horizons of novelty and possibility these discourses project, and the quasi-spiritual explanation they provide for incidental occurrences, might elicit an intrinsic ideology, functional to the control and exercise of power. Questions of temporality and space, consciousness and attention, affectivity and desire are also central to his project, as he evaluates the risks that contingency poses to the state of agency in the late-modern individual. At 22, Simone is currently the youngest candidate in the Graduate School, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Alongside his PhD-related activities, Simone supervises a research project for UIS Research Centre, a pioneering, student-led think tank that works on policy papers concerning Italy's most compelling issues. For the organisation, his team is assessing the current state of Italy’s cultural output. Named "L'Ennesimo Nuovo, Analisi e Proposte per una Cultura del Futuro" (The New, Again: Analyses and Proposals for a Culture of the Future), the project gauges the nation's ability to effectively foster a culture which resists the current zeitgeist and, most importantly, offers pathways to a viable creation of the future.
Simone is also assistant to the organising committee of ‘21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture’, a symposium hosted by MCCS department at Goldsmiths, which fosters a cross-disciplinary dialogue on spiritual practices with scholars from other internationally leading institutions, such as MIT (USA), Rutgers University (USA), Concordia University (Canada), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland).
As part of his undergraduate studies, completed in 2023, he specialised in both mobile and print journalism with a training in news and feature writing, sub-editing and fact-checking. He collaborated with fellow students to create Blurr, an online magazine that explored the concept of the other. He was picked as the co-editor of Tablecloth, a cultural magazine whose first printed issue was published in March 2023. He spent three weeks working for Epsom and Ewell Times, a not-for-profit publication partnered with the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service. His work also appeared on The Tab and EastLondonLines.
Simone was born and raised in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot shape, where the branches of centuries-old olive trees sway at the pace of sea waves. Before moving to London, he worked for an Italian radio station, where he strengthened his knowledge of audio writing, broadcasting and editing while working alongside senior producers.