Roehampton academic presents experimental writing at Runnymede Literary Festival

• Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Dr. Richard A Carter, Lecturer in Digital Media, appeared at an event hosted by Runnymede Literary Festival and experimental writing press Osmosis.

A Spill Across Boundaries was an event organised on March 27 2021, by the experimental writing press, Osmosis, as part of the Runnymede Literary Festival. Osmosis Press was founded specifically to support the publication of works that do not sit easily within conventional, formal definitions of poetry and prose, and instead actively challenge our sense of what writing is and can be.

At this event, Dr. Richard Carter presented his work on two research projects, one established, and one up-coming, that are yielding creative, experimental outputs as part of their enquiry into the nature of drone and satellite sensing platforms, and the forms of knowledge they produce about our world.

Waveform employs drones, machine vision technologies, and generative writing algorithms to transform photographic data into poetry, while Orbital Reveries is a new project that performs a similar undertaking using satellite imagery.

Both projects employ creative research strategies to bring together different technologies, practices, and theoretical conceptions in order to shed light on their shared contexts, functioning and implications.

Dr. Carter, Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Roehampton, said:

“The act of parsing visual data into poetry may appear unusual, but the operation sheds critical light on the nature of what we understand digital data to be, and gives us cause to think of what other forms it might take – as we attempt to sense, and make sense, of a rapidly changing world.

Presenting at Runnymede offered another opportunity to connect my research with the work of practitioners who are at the very forefront of exploring the potentials of writing – developing new ways to characterise our experiences of sensing, knowing and being.”

You can find out more about Waveform, Orbital Reveries, and Dr. Carter’s work by clicking here.