Research talks

The film Slaughterbots was commissioned by the Future of Life Institute to highlight the threat of weaponisation of artificial intelligence.  Utilising Hollywood cinematic tropes the film was launched anonymously so as to go viral. Slaughterbots depicts a fictional attack on the U.S. Senate by lethal drone weapons. The film achieved 200K views in its launch and has over 2 million views on YouTube alone. Filmed mostly at University of Hertfordshire campus, undergraduate and postgraduate film students worked alongside the crew with drama students playing roles in many scenes. The film was screened at the 2017 meeting in Geneva of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) and had an immediate impact in that the meeting resolved to work to “lay the groundwork necessary to negotiate a new CCW protocol on lethal autonomous weapons systems.” Using case studies including Slaughterbots this presentation focuses on strategies developed by the Games and Visual Effects Research Lab to facilitate research led teaching. G+VERL’s current research investigates moving image dramaturgy in terms of medium and modality and has focused recently on VR and AR. Employing a transdisciplinary approach to problem solving the team have created impactful projects with particle physicists, choreographers, astronomers and filmmakers.

In 2019, Arrow Films released a new high-definition restoration of Ring (Nakata, 1998) and its sequels, a cult Japanese film franchise about a cursed videotape. My research explores the ways the Ring series evolved through retelling, serialisation and re-release, but also considers the implications of technological development. Can we consider restoration a form of adaptation, particularly when digital transfer impacts the aesthetic of a film which once relied on the lower quality of VHS as part of its viewing culture? And how does a horror series about a haunted videotape remain relevant when the death of that media format is only underlined by the retelling the story on new digital formats?

Changes in television and new media have altered what is considered a ‘quality’ approach to the past on TV. I will consider this using HBO’s Chernobyl (2019) and its companion The Chernobyl Podcast (2019). Chernobyl explores historical narrativisation, engaging with contemporary discourses around ‘fake news’, and the podcast complements this by exploring the programme’s own process of narrativising the Chernobyl disaster. I will explore how the use of a self-reflexive podcast for publicity on one hand encourages a reading of the programme as artificial history and, on the other, recognises that Chernobyl can and ought to be publicised this way, given the ease of accessing and recirculating conflicting information online.

Found footage horror cinema is one of the most instantly visually recognisable subgenres in North American horror cinema, and since the turn of the millennium it has become an enduring presence in the genre. Despite this, scholarship dedicated to this body of films is relatively scarce. My research posits that found footage horror presents new and innovative ways of engaging with a pervasive contemporary culture of fear through its themes and form, and that its immediacy - framing itself as part of the audience’s reality rather than adjacent to it - lends the subgenre a unique ability to confront trauma

The promotional campaign for Prometheus (Scott, 2012) took a transmedia form from its trailers to the TED-style talk introducing the key character, Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce). But at the heart of this campaign was its diegetic website providing an entry point to the world of Alien. I will consider how the fictional world is represented through the fictional corporate site of Weylandindustries.com, and how it manages the complexity of the film series’ chronology, before considering how it brought together what Tolkien described as the ‘secondary’ fictional world with the ‘primary’ real world (1939:140). In sum, I will demonstrate how, as promotional budgets rise, distinctions between film content and creative marketing are eroded.

The presentation will introduce a long-term research/creative project which uses real-time searches of large data sets produced by social media systems to permit the visualisation of collective thought in real-time. I’ll begin by briefly exploring the relationship between technology and those who make and use it and will suggest that digital technology affects the ways modern humans think, thought patterns which the examination of social media data can reveal. I’ll then present a couple of implementations; ‘What We Think About When We Think About…’ which autonomously generates streams of collective consciousness and the first public showing of ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’, a VR based digital oracle.

In this commercial space age, audiences increasingly expect realism in science fiction. Weightlessness is commonly simulated through physical or virtual special effects, but reduced gravity aircraft offer opportunities for capturing the effects of microgravity more authentically. While this poses practical challenges for costume designers, it also invites the possibility of creative engagement with weightlessness. Costume can be employed to visibly evidence the effects of weightlessness, but to take advantage of this opportunity, designers must discard many of the fundamental principles of fashion design.

Season 10 marked a decade of Drag Race, with RuPaul and other celebrities framing the show as a worldwide phenomenon promoting love, inclusivity, acceptance and Drag. This aspect of RuPaul’s Drag Race is foregrounded in much of the existing scholarship on the reality show which considers the inclusivity and visibility that it offers (Edgar, 2011; Goldmark, 2015). Although Drag Race brings an area of gay culture and history into the mainstream (i.e. RuPaul seasons and Werk the World Tour), we argue that the only Queen and Herstory that is promoted and unquestionably validated is RuPaul Herself. RuPaul as Ultimate Queen is achieved through strategically using the themes of history and authenticity to support a commodification of RuPaul which reinforces celebrity, cultural capital and authority. From Queens lip-syncing to RuPaul’s back catalogue to the central place RuPaul places herself as drag pioneer; we explore ‘RuPaul as commodity’ and the possible implications on the presentation and marketability of gay / drag culture through the format of Drag Race and RuPaul as ultimate Queen. All queens assume the position behind her.

The alien invasion narrative was, of course, one of the defining modes of science fiction cinema in the 1950s. From early examples such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Man from Planet X (1951) through to Invisible Invaders (1959) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), America spent an entire decade obsessed with extraterrestrial invaders from worlds beyond our own. Archetypal readings of these films have linked them decisively with Cold War tensions between the United States and Soviet Russia, and particularly with the dual threats of communist infiltration and nuclear annihilation. But as Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency came to an end and John F. Kennedy took office, the nation's appetite for interstellar marauders dwindled in the early 1960s, and the alien invasion narrative did not experience a popular resurgence for nearly twenty years. It was only under the presidency of Ronald Reagan between 1981 and 1989 that America once again became obsessed with extraterrestrial invaders. Perhaps this is not surprising; a back-to-basics conservative, Reagan sought to erase the social progress of the 1960s and 1970s and reignite the Cold War (or, in other words, take America back to the 1950s).

And, importantly, the new cycle of alien invasion films that proliferated during his presidency borrowed heavily from the golden age of science fiction cinema. This is especially true in the case of direct remakes such as The Thing (1982) and Invaders from Mars (1986), but the likes of Strange Invaders (1983), Night of the Creeps (1986) and They Live (1988) also borrow variously from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), It Conquered the World (1956) and The Brain Eaters (1958) amongst others. However, they frequently revise the Cold War politics of their predecessors for the Reagan era. In They Live's take on the Body Snatchers narrative, for example, infiltrating aliens no longer stand in for communists but capitalists: its extraterrestrials are interstellar yuppies who silently brainwash the inhabitants of other planets with subliminal messages encouraging obedience and consumption. This seminar will explore the social, cultural and political significance of the Reagan era's invasion cycle, and will pay particular attention to the ways in which they might be seen to support or subvert New Right politics.