Practice-as-Research Presentation and Sharing Panel 1 ​

+ welcome and introduction from the organisers

Thursday 18 July 10:00-11:30

Lobby ​

Meera Darji
Birmingham City University
An exploration of the phenomenological conception of qualia through practice-as-research.

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Meera Darji will be contributing to the event by sharing her work ‘Visions of Qualia’ – a twin-screen experimental film alongside a talk/presentation. Her piece is an exploration of the phenomenological conception of qualia, which is defined as sensations that our subconscious cannot define other than through the experience of that feeling itself. She will discuss the phenomena of the twin screen technique with influences of Vertov and Herzog. The piece aims to combine the ‘absolute’ with the ‘real’ using new technology to capture what is only possible through the kino eye. Her presentation will elaborate on techniques she used to re-create these experiences to heighten sensorial elements.

Meera Darji is an independent filmmaker, practice-based researcher and lecturer at Birmingham City University. Her practice-research focuses on investigating cinema verité techniques to present a more ‘authentic’ voice in documentary practice. She is both a documentary and experimental filmmaker. She experiments with ethno-sensory practice combined with immersive technologies to tell real stories of marginalised communities in India. Her explorations include using new technologies to develop new ways of storytelling and to use new software to create non-representational film. She is working on developing her practice by placing these films in sensorial environments. She aims to follow the Fluxus manifesto in her experimental practice to fuse the personal and the political.

Fraser Cornall
Lancaster University
Stand Within: the process of making 'existential' practice.

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Fraser Cornall will present his first-person philosophical practice research and have his connected film, Stand Within (Cornall, 2024), available online for viewing. The presentation will explore his artistic approach which used Nausea (Sartre 1938), the fictional existential diary, as a starting point and framework for his creation. Fraser will detail the diary process of turning a feeling into first-person proses, redrafting the feeling, then moving it to film. This work is connected to the researcher's PhD thesis of exposing a connection between existential philosophy and the structural film.

Fraser Cornall, M.A., AFHEA, is a Practical PhD Candidate in Film at Lancaster University. His research focuses on creating a collision between Existential Philosophy and Structural Film. Inspired by The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 1942), he is creating a large-scale structural film project that combines his own lived experience with the philosophy of existence. His first PhD film to be released, Closed Eyes (Cornall, 2023), has been showcased at the ‘Let Us See You’ Exhibition, at Aire Place Studios, 2024. The film has been showcased for collective-iz in their ‘Light-Move-Morecambe’ exhibition and at the inaugural International Experimental Fictional Film Conference, 2023

Joshua Alexander
Loughborough University 
Professional Development (Enchanted Forest PLC): the disruption of corporate digital content through the use of experimental moving image. 

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Joshua Alexander will present his practice-as-research PhD project which explores the use of experimental moving image to disrupt corporate digital content. He will discuss the audio-visual techniques and methods he uses to problematise the representation of the self in relation to digital technology, corporate culture, and the imperatives of neoliberalism. His talk will be followed by a screening of his film Professional Development (Enchanted Forest PLC), an 11-min experimental narrative which depicts a man who goes for a job trial at Enchanted Forest PLC, entering an eerie world where he loses contact with reality

Joshua Alexander is a moving image artist based in Oxford. He is currently doing a practice-as-research PhD in moving image at Loughborough University, a project for which he was awarded a Studentship. Screenings of his moving image work include the Whitechapel Gallery and London Short Film Festival. Awards include Best Film at Swedenborg Film Festival 2022 and Best Editing at Exit 6 Film Festival 2022

Practice-as-Research Presentation and Sharing Panel 2 ​

Thursday 18 July 11:30-13:00

Development Lab

Felicia Konrad and Julieanna Preston
She says, She says: A Vocal Video Performance Presentation

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she says, she says (7’46”) is a vocal video performance between two friends, two lands, two continents on opposite sides of the earth. Two voices migrate back and forth in an improvisational, vibrating circuitry navigating through thick, loose, dense, light, smooth, turbid, calm, fierce and fickle geography, each refrain gaining and loosing bits of the landscape it has touched. Adjustments and inflections retune the voice as it makes its way from here to there, now to then, her to her, again and again, as sounds waves vibrating the molecules of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies—refrains of geo-haptic tones

Felicia Konrad is a multidisciplinary artist living in Sweden. Her solo works are minimalistic, poetic, humorous small-scale pieces. As a cultural project leader artivist/climate activist, she is involved with collaborative, interactive, collectives. Recent works include I Still Live in Water, Breathing Water, and The Oracle.
 
Julieanna Preston’s artistic practice is grounded in durational, site-situated, vocalisation and body movement works. Her performances, videos, installations, and scholarship extend attributes and agency to worldly materials, places, pages and written and spoken words in search of a spectrum of intimate and animate modalities. Julieanna lives in Aotearoa/ NZ.

Michael Morgan
University of Kent 
Embodied Performance Techniques for Experimental Fiction Filmmaking: Collaborative Interaction Between the Filmmaker and the Performer in the Artisanal Mode of Production

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Morgan will outline a practice of collaboration between the director and the actor in the artisanal mode of production, which involves embodied performance techniques for experimental fiction filmmaking. His presentation will focus on the director’s operation of the handheld camera to facilitate interactions with the actor that are based on both external (physical) movements and internal (imagined) movements. Directing and acting techniques will be introduced with screenings of exercises from workshops, in addition to their applications in a production, with screenings of scenes from the experimental fiction short film The Heights (2024)

Morgan is a filmmaker and scholar of experimental narrative fiction. He is completing a PhD Film: Practice as Research at the University of Kent (UK). His project develops a concept and method of collaborative performance between the director and the actor in artisanal filmmaking. The dissertation contains both a written thesis and an audio-visual portfolio, including performance exercises, screen tests and short films. Morgan currently works at Montclair State University (USA), where he teaches film.

Karolina Kucia 
University of the Arts, Helsinki
Monstrous Agencies – Resisting Precarisation within the Organisation of Collaboration and Authorship

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Karolina Kucia presents the cinematographic apparatus used in her short film WE BITES US (2023), which combines the cinematographer's point of view with that of an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a camera and controlled by a wearable 'prosthesis', a glove with gyroscopic sensors attached to an actor's body. The film is part of her doctoral thesis: Monstrous Agencies - Resisting Precarisation within the Organisation of Collaboration and Authorship. The research on parasitic and monstrous relationships aims to recognise the interdependence and recombination of the power structure of a working environment, conditions and format, including the human and non-human agencies involved

Karolina Kucia is a performance artist with a background in sculpture, intermedia and performance studies. She is currently completing her artistic doctorate at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. She develops organisational scores based on concepts of parasite, monster and slip in the context of the precarisation of labour in post-neoliberal capitalism and the current form of art institutions.

Practice-as-Research Presentation and Sharing Panel 3 ​

Thursday 18 July 14:00-15:30

Lobby

Adrián Sánchez Martínez and Andreu Martínez
Pompeu Fabra University
Allospace and the haptic image in contemporary horror film: The cases of Skinamarink (2022) and The Outwaters (2022)

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In this video presentation, it is examined how "allospace," a type of cinematic space traditionally present in experimental cinema, has influenced contemporary independent horror films, reflecting shifts in visual culture due to digital technology. Coined by Umberto Eco, allospace transcends realism, opposing traditional cinematic space whose main function is to support narration. Instead, allospace uses a rhizomatic logic and plastic experimentation, as seen in arthouse films like Wedlock House: An Intercourse or L'Ange. By analyzing two contemporary horror films, Skinamarink and The Outwaters, it is argued that the incorporation of allospace in genre cinema reflects an iconic turn in visual culture, where images are encountered rather than read. This shift allows genre cinema to adopt experimental techniques, expanding the possibilities of fiction cinema.

Adrián Sánchez Martínez is predoctoral researcher trainee at the Pompeu Fabra University, where he is currently developing his Ph.D. thesis, focused on the performative possibilities of narration in contemporary cinema. His work so far focuses on the relations between cinema and performativity, representations of the urban landscape and semiothic approaches to experimental film. He is also a professor in private film school La Casa del Cine, based in Barcelona.
 
Andreu Martínez Chaves is a predoctoral researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, where he is currently developing a doctoral thesis on imaginary representations of space in contemporary world cinema. His work to date has focused on the study of cinematic space and on contemporary fantastic cinema.  He's also a professor of silent cinema and film criticism at La Casa del Cine and writes for cultural magazine Rockdelux.

Vron Harris 
Middlesex University
The Staircase

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The Staircase is a Middlesex University funded project that began with the following research questions:
How is it possible to make a film that evokes a character's internal state of mind while at the same time pointing to the split between what is felt internally and what is presented externally? And how could the use of the Stanislavski System and later works by  Katie Mitchell and Judith Weston support this aim? How could collaborating with different performers in different ways achieve a range of end results despite the same starting point of ideas? In terms of the construction of film itself, how might it be possible to consider certain conventions of art and cinema and how might these be re-used, re-purposed and reframed with particular regard to the use of symbolism, representation, the gaze, subject object/relations, the idea of the hero’s journey, the motif of the woman in the window, and the use of stillness, static camera and off-screen space?

Vron Harris is an award-winning, internationally exhibited filmmaker.  Vron’s practice is interested in the construction of film and the representation of time, space and emotion. There’s an interest in collaborating with performers: actors, dancers and crew, and in creating film, particularly via the use of static camera and offscreen space.  There’s an interest in the possibility of using still images to create a sense of movement and moving images to create a sense of stillness.

Joshua Magor
Southbank University 
Termite films: A consideration of experimental fiction filmmaking modalities.

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Taking its name from Manny Farber’s seminal essay “White Elephant Art vs Termite Art”, This mixed session (talk + workshop) will look to generate a conversation around the role of process within fiction filmmaking methodologies and investigate the way in which experimental fiction filmmaking may manifest in contemporary moving image culture.

Joshua Magor is an award winning South African filmmaker whose work has shown at numerous international film festivals and has screened at prestigious institutions such as the Barbican Centre in London, the Chicago Cultural Centre and the Tatham Art Gallery in South Africa. As a director his debut feature film “Siyabonga” made its world premiere in the main competition of the 71st Locarno Film Festival and went on to play extensively around the world at cinemas, film festivals and art galleries. Joshua is a Berlinale Talents alumni, member of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image and in 2019 was endorsed by Arts Council England as an Exceptional Talent in Film and Television.

Nobunye Levin
King's College, London
Notes on expanded cinema: Reverie in fragments and the incomplete film

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Reverie (Nobunye Levin and Palesa Shongwe, 2023) lies at the nexus of videographic criticism and the essay film. The film explores the concept and state of reverie as a political tool for emancipatory dreaming. It emerges from a feminist love praxis that is found in the filmmakers’ – Levin and Shongwe – collaboration both within the film, and historically, and it experimentally employs out-takes and fragments from the filmmakers’ previous works in critical conversation with the film Come Back Africa (Lionel Rogosin, 1959) and YouTube clips of the South African singer and activist Letta Mbulu. 
 
Reverie is a film continuously in process, revealing knowledge as open-ended. It employs practices of expanded cinema both in its incompleteness and public exhibition. This talk reflects on this through a series of audio-visual notes, in and through Reverie, that offer a set of observations on the aesthetic-political potential of the film’s conception as a fragmentary durational unfinished film, realised through the film fragment as mode. 

Dr. Nobunye Levin is a filmmaker, scholar and teacher. Nobunye’s filmmaking practice and research is concerned with epistemologies from the Global South, feminist love studies, the politics of aesthetics and decolonial feminist and anti-racist thought and practice. Her work is informed by the epistemic, poetic and political possibilities of cinematic experimentation and tactics of feminist filmmaking. She is a Lecturer in Film Studies in the Film Studies Department at King’s College, London. Prior to this she was a Lecturer in the Film and Television Department in the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Decolonising Screen Worlds in the ERC-funded “African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies” project, situated at SOAS, University of London.

Practice-as-Research Presentation and Sharing Panel 4 ​

Thursday 18 July 15:45-17:00

Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)

Pavel Prokopič
University of Salford 
Becoming Barcelona: atmospheric experimental fiction film production

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Pavel will introduce and screen the experimental fiction film Becoming Barcelona (2019), which was made using an innovative production method entitled Affective Atmosphere. As an approach to filmmaking, affective atmosphere prioritises the becoming of an event over a narrative/production plan, and uses experimental production strategies to maximise the potential of spontaneous directorial decisions and the unpredictable flow of reality for generating alternative narrative/dramatic film structures.

Pavel Prokopic is the INEFF principal investigator, as well as a filmmaker, researcher and lecturer in Film Production at the University of Salford. His current research focuses on advancing cinema as a unique form of art and storytelling by synthesising creative practice-as-research, philosophical concepts, and an innovative application of traditional methods and cutting-edge information and communication technologies, which is exemplified in the recent Nested Cinema installation. His work has been widely published, exhibited and presented, including FACT in Liverpool, Grosvenor Gallery in Manchester and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He holds a PhD in Film from the AHRC North West Consortium/University of Salford, and a Master’s degree in Film Aesthetics from Magdalen College, University of Oxford. For more information, please visit pavelprokopic.com

Matthew Hawkins 
Southbank University
The Concept of Affective Tonality as Method for Narrative Fiction Filmmaking 

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In this presentation I will detail an artistic practice method for a cinema of affective tonality. Five conditions for the production of an affective-tonal cinema will be outlined alongside a taxonomy of affect. This method of artistic practice draws upon the rich history of film and philosophy focused on affect studies and was developed alongside the production of the feature film, Bullseye, A Film in Four Movements. The film was made in the process of generating a method of practice that centres the body, affect and sensation in the production process. This method of practice results in narrative fiction films that engage a spectator on a haptic, corporeal level, which privileges feeling over cognition and Aristotelian linearity.
​The full film is available to view throughout the event on Looped Screen 6 in the Green Screen Studio. 

Matthew is a filmmaker and academic. His research interest in film practice is focused on affect and tone in narrative cinema, documentary film, and experimental practice. He holds a PhD from the University of East London, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This research project, entitled The Concept of Affective Tonality and the Role of the Senses in Producing a Cinematic Narrative, is focused on affective and mood, rooted in a Deleuzian film-philosophy, and how this can be used as a method and methodology for composing narrative fiction film that privileges the subjective experience of characters, rhythm, and tone, over traditional narrative structure. Matthew is Chair of the Screen Research Group and Course Director for Film Practice in the Division of Film at London South Bank University.

 Alex Lichtenfels 
University of Salford 
Making Western Silence – finding fictions in materials

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This presentation explores the methods involved in making the experimental fiction film Western Silence. Drawing on devising methods established by Tectonic Theatre, and the performance methods of Alvaro Hernandez, the presentation asks how theatrical and performance traditions of devising can be brought into a fiction filmmaking context? In particular, this form of devising uses engagement with the materiality of our environment and collaborators, rather than narrative, as the basis from which we generate filmed material. As such, this presentation explores the challenge of bringing the notion of fiction to bear on such a process.
The full film Western Silence is shown in the preceding DMPL session at 14:00. 

Alex Lichtenfels is Senior Lecturer at University of Salford. His filmmaking practices centre around notions of devised cinema, adapting and incorporating theatrical and performance traditions to a filmmaking context. His work invites collaborators from many disciplines, and the guiding principle behind it is to design and enact non-hierarchical filmmaking processes. ​

Practice-as-Research Presentation and Sharing Panel 5 ​

Friday 19 July 10:00-11:30

Lobby

Annie Morrad 
University of Lincoln
Consequences of actions; everything has meaning. 

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Using experimental practice-based research within an art practice context when using the following; voice, sound, timbre, gesture and video with a non-human avian species. The intention in making the artwork is always to have a shared experience of equality that brings agency to the non-human avians. This presentation will explore how language can be created through dialogues with non-human avian species. Formed to facilitate an interconnection and interaction between artist and non-human with the intention of making video artwork. The produced artwork is then transferred into a language that in turn produces an encounter between the video and receiver. These encounters enable co-productions exhibited in gallery installations and discussed in conferences and symposiums.

Annie Morrad is an internationally exhibited artist, musician and lecturer. A Senior Lecturer in BA and MA Photo, University of Lincoln, UK. Dr Morrad’s work uses conceptual ideas on interspecies communication and is opposed to speciesism and hierarchy. The art practice incorporates: music; installation; photography; performance; video and sound.Plus live improvised saxophone. Based on a belief that during the time of ‘gatherers and foragers’ there was one unified language used for communication between nonhumans and humans. This was conducted through observation, timbre, sound, gesture, rhythm and smell. Part of this art practice is to rediscover forms of this language and have dialogues with non-human species.

Daksha Patel 
 ‘Wateriness 1& 2': Lidar and photogrammetry film screening and introduction

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‘Wateriness 1& 2' were filmed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park during a residency with Invisible Flock. They combine Lidar and photogrammetry footage with video. Lidar technologies are typically used to scan rock formations and are not designed to scan water. I wanted to push this to its limits and explore whether it could capture ‘wateriness’. In ‘Wateriness 1', my body movements as I walk with a Lidar scanner along a lake suggest the movement of water. In ‘Wateriness 2’ Lidar is combined with photogrammetry footage from a drone. Both films were projected upon the surface of the lake at night, and re-filmed.

Daksha Patel is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across a wide range of media, materials and technologies. She is particularly interested in experimental film-making and combines technologies such as creative coding, Lidar scanning and photogrammetry with video. Her films have been selected for: 'Experimental Brasil’ film festival, (2024); ‘CuVo’ film festival, Spain (2024); Raw Science film festival, Costa Rica (2022); Bristol Science film festival, UK (2022); ShortCircuitFilms, Fabrica Gallery, Brighton (2022 & 2024); VAST LAB experimental film festival, Los Angeles (2023); nominated for AltFF Alternative Film Festival, Toronto (2022) and short listed for the Jean Golding Data Science film prize (2022).
https://dakshapatel.co.uk

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon
Open University
About the Night: collaborative process and innovative narrative forms that challenge cinematic boundaries

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Filmmaking often seems like alchemy, blending talent, skill, and serendipity. This mystique is unhelpful, fostering the 'cult of the director' and overshadowing the collaborative efforts essential to filmmaking. This practice-led research explores fiction film creation, focusing on which stories are told and by whom. It will reveal the collaborative process and innovative narrative forms that challenge cinematic boundaries. About the Night, inspired by Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, rejects a conventional conflict-resolution structure, demonstrating how filmmakers need space for ‘dangerous creativity’, by embracing uncertainty, chance and risk and will explore how ‘friction’, as a positive concept, can create radical stories.

I am an independent filmmaker and experienced academic. I have produced and directed short fiction films which have been showcased on UK television and at prestigious festivals including Edinburgh, Brooklyn, and Cork. My latest work, About the Night, has garnered acclaim, wining Best Story at The British International Film Festival and receiving nominations for Best Narrative Short Film at the Miami Women Film Festival, New York Arthouse Film Festival, and nominated for Best Female Director, European Short Awards. Most recently, the film was nominated for Best Screen-based Practice Research (short) at the BAFTSS Conference and received an honourable mention.