On Not Knowing

The volume, particularly relevant within the current emergence of the pedagogic turn within art practice and curation, is an important contribution to current debates around the creative process.

Modern British Sculpture Catalogue

From Leighton to Lucas this fascinating book explores sculpture in Britain from the end of the Victorian era to the dawn of the new millennium. With incisive essays, and previously unpublished archive material, this compelling book documents the seismic shifts in sculpture in the last century. Edited by Penelope Curtis (former Curator of the Henry Moore Institute, now Director of the Tate Britain) and Keith Wilson (Sculptor, tutor at the Royal College of Art and Reader in Fine Art at University of Westminster).

The Cinema of Raul Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies

This book is the first major academic engagement with the idiosyncratic Chilean-born filmmaker Raul Ruiz. It examines his work from the context of Allende's Chile to France and Europe from the 1970s, examining such themes as aesthetics and politics, simulation, multiplicity and theories of the image

Guerrilla Networks: An Anarcheology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies

A monograph based on my sabbatical research on radical media ecologies in the 1970s in film, video, radio, television and music. This project aims to develop the paradgims of media archaeology and ecologies in a political way via the concepts of media anarchaeology and guerrilla networks

Cracking the USA? Interpreting UK-to-US TV Drama Translations

For well over half a century, British TV drama production has both inherited from and aimed to appeal to nations and cultures beyond the UK, particularly the lucrative (yet notoriously tough) US TV market. However, in the context of mainstream American broadcasting, British-produced imports have never been anything more than a peripheral presence on US small screens. A currently prominent production strategy aiming to counter the mainstream US TV market's aversion to foreign-sourced drama, in an attempt to access prime-time broadcasting positions, is a process which can be labelled as UK-to-US TV drama ‘translation’: the ‘recreation’ of British-based dramas within an American cultural framework. Whilst the cultural reconfiguration of game show and reality/lifestyle TV formats has received heightened critical attention in recent years, investigation into the international translation of TV drama remains less developed. This paper investigates both the internal textual operations and the external production dynamics involved in the process of UK-to-US TV drama translation, drawing on direct interview material from industry professionals. The UK and US versions of the crime drama Cracker constitute the core translation case study, utilising the close analysis of text and production context as a lens through which to examine the mechanics of UK-to-US TV drama translation.

The Punk-Rock King: Musical Anachronism in Period Film

Music has a powerful indexical ability to evoke particular times and places. Such an ability has been exploited at length by the often-elaborate soundscapes of period films, which regularly utilise incidental scores and featured period songs to help root their narrative action in past times, and to immerse their audiences in the sensibilities of a different age. However, this article will begin to examine the ways in which period film soundtracks can also be used to complicate a narrative sense of time and place through the use of ‘musical anachronism’: music conspicuously ‘out of time’ with the temporality depicted on screen. Through the analysis of a sequence from the film W.E. (Madonna, 2011) and the consideration of existing critical and conceptual contexts, this article will explore how anachronistic soundtracks can function beyond ‘postmodern novelty’ or ‘nuisance’ to historical verisimilitude, instead offering alternative modes of engagement with story and history.

Telephones, Voice Recorders, Microphones, Phonographs: A Media Archaeology of Sonic Technologies in Twin Peaks

This article argues that sonic technologies, such as telephones, voice recorders and phonographs, alongside more (audio)visual ones such as flickering fluorescent lights, videos, and the television sets are crucial to the world of Twin Peaks, and constitute this world as both a communications network with portals to the unknown, and an accumulation of recordings of ghosted voices and entities, perhaps finding its ultimate expression in the backwards reprocessed speech in the Black Lodge. This lodge can be understood as a space in which there are nothing but recordings, albeit now on a cosmic, spiritual and demonic level. Using a media archaeological approach to these devices in the series, this paper will argue that they were already operating by a media archaeological logic, generating the world of Twin Peaks as a haunted archive of sonic and other mediations.

Filming the Post-Fordist Worker: From Industrial Hollywood to Digital Biopolitics

Article co-authored with Dr Halligan on post-fordist work in cinema from Hollywood and 1980s films like Secret of my Success to Boss of it All and The Social Network. This article argues that new approaches to film and post-fordist work are needed and draws upon the post-autonomist thought of Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato and Virno.