The Swarm: drone as composite technology and neo-liberal fantasy, in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology . Richardson, M. & Pong, B. (eds), Technographies (OHP), August 2024

This chapter frames the complex cultural evolution of the drone against a global socio-political backdrop of surveillance, remote-warfare and climate collapse. Using key works from cinema, corporate advertising, military doctrine and media art it will demonstrate that the convergence of automation, machine vision and A.I. has become a central trope of our interpretation of what it might mean to be human in a near-future habitat fit for the swarm.

The Hunger’s deathly shadow: The sweet annihilation of David Bowie, NYC, circa. 1983, in I’m Not a Film Star: David Bowie as Actor, Dixon, I. & Black, B. (eds) Bloomsbury (2022)

This chapter is a performance of allusions, placing Bowie’s role in The Hunger at the centre of a convergent image stream of fabrication and mimicry, a hyper-visual culture that privileged style over substance, with allusions also to both the present and the past, burnt into Scott’s lavish film. Disfigurement, isolation, addiction, rejection, the cool logic of the decade of greed – it's all there in The Hunger.

The Liquid Electric - Tracing Nature’s Machine Code in Virtualities and Realities: New Experiences, Art and Ecologies in Immersive Environments. Smite, R. & Smits, R. (eds), Acoustic Space, Volume 17, RIXC, (2019)

Representations of techno-ecologies have a deep and evocative history embedded as they are within our most elaborate cultural fantasies and our most extreme scientific simulations. These digital media dreamscapes constitute the foundation principles of an emergent data aesthetics of liquid. Hollywood has codified this through an art director’s pallet that is often blue and luminous in tone, is found at the core of a film’s novum and often takes on a kinetic electrical form. A ‘liquid modernity’ as it were, bracketed by the twilight years of industrialization and an emergent century of automation and augmentation.

The Capstone Experience: Five Principles for a Connected Curriculum in Higher Education and the Future of Graduate Employability: A Connectedness Learning Approach, with Are, K, Schmidt, M, Goodwin-Hawkins, B, and Aayeshah, A. Bridgstock, R. & Tippett, N. (eds), Edward Elgar (2019)

In this chapter, we contribute to advancing thinking around capstone experiences by drawing on the Connectedness Learning Model which, we argue, can more closely address the challenges brought to higher education in our particular moment in the twenty-first century.