Projects
Find out more about our current projects
- Artificial Lives
Artificial Lives is a research project which explores the various new ways in which life is being imagined, enhanced and engineered under contemporary conditions. The phenomenon of artificial life, as it is emerging across disciplines and cultures, is one of the signal characteristics of our age. The exponential growth this century of a digital public sphere produces an artificial life online; artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly adept at reproducing the effects of consciousness; advances in medical science make it possible to extend, augment and artificially sustain life in myriad ways; adaptations in genetic engineering make it possible to edit and invent lifeforms (including viruses) in the laboratory. The project suggests that these changes in the way that we understand both natural and artificial life require us urgently to adapt our existing critical, discursive and aesthetic categories, and it brings together artists, critics, theorists and scientists to begin the work of inventing the languages, artforms and vocabularies that might give adequate expression to our emerging artificial lives.
The project has run three international conferences in recent years (at Sussex in 2017, at UC Riverside in 2018, at The Huntington, California in 2021). These conferences have brought together artists such as Paul Vanouse and François-Joseph Lapointe, with literary theorists such as N Katherine Hayles, David Wills, Michael Jonik and Arthur Bradley, with medical anthropologists such as Lesley A Sharp, architectural theorists such as Spyros Papapetros, and scholars working in disability studies, artificial intelligence and the medical humanities such as Lisa Diedrich, Jennifer Rhee and Kalindi Vora. Sherryl Vint and Peter Boxall are continuing to develop the project, and are in the process of editing a major collection of essays, entitled Artificial Lives. The project has fostered links with the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) Paris, The Paris Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institut universitaire de France, and attracted funding from the Leverhulme trust, the University of Sussex, UC Riverside and the Huntington Library.
In December 2021, the MLA (The Modern Language Association of America) announced that it was awarding its fifty-second annual James Russell Lowell Prize to Peter Boxall, for The Prosthetic Imagination. Read more
Interview with Peter Boxall on his book The Prosthetic Imagination:
Roundtable discussion of ‘The Artificial Life of the Novel’ with Peter Boxall, Nancy Armstrong, Laura Marcus, Ato Quayson, Ankhi Mukherjee and Sherryl Vint.
- Beyond the Archive
In Beyond the Archive, contemporary artists, young people, teachers and researchers investigate Victorian word-image archives and produce new works in response. Our events have included collaborations with the British Museum, the National Museum of Wales, the V&A and other organisations; events at partner schools; and sessions at the University of Sussex working with our own nineteenth-century printing press. Around 500 participants have produced digital art, poetry, hand-made relief prints and critical writing. Collaborating artists include Peter S. Smith and Chris Pig from the Society of Wood Engravers. More information is on our project website, Woodpeckings, which includes two virtual exhibitions and many creative and critical works by participants. The work has been featured in Printmaking Today; in the National Archive’s A Year in Archives 2020; and published by the National Society for Education in Art and Design. Beyond the Archive is led by Bethan Stevens, Hannah Field and Lindsay Smith.
- Hi Zero
Hi Zero was a regular reading series of poetry and performance held in Brighton throughout 2011-2020. The series almost always took place upstairs at the Hope & Ruin on Queen’s Road and featured seventy-seven readings over its nine-year existence. 184 poets read at the series, of which most are represented in the audio archive. Most readings featured three poets; certain end-of-year events, beginning with the thirtieth reading in December 2014, featured many more. The series was founded and run by Joe Luna and Robbie Dawson in the first instance, and co-run with Eleanor Careless between 2016-2018. Hi Zero magazine was a small magazine designed, in the first instance, to be a companion to the events themselves. It featured poetry and critical essays by the readers in the series and sundry others. Six issues ran concurrently with the first six readings, and thereafter haphazardly up to the last issue (27) in 2015. The magazine is numbered by the reading series event which it accompanied. Hard copies of the magazines are held in variously complete runs by some UK libraries, including the University of Sussex library. See WorldCat for further details.
Robbie Dawson designed and produced the majority of the artwork for the series, including the magazine covers. Josh Cook designed posters for the series between 2015-2018. The reading series received financial support from the School of English and the Centre for Modernist Studies throughout its existence.
Visit the HiZero archive which includes recordings of readings and poster images
- Quick Fictions
Quick Fictions is the brainchild of Professor Nicholas Royle. It grew out of his interest in experimental projects and new kinds of writing. In particular, he wanted to explore the question of how to write – inventively, thoughtfully, memorably – in the age of the short attention span.
Royle says: ‘Quick Fictions are the writing of our time. Quick means: alive, vigorous, sharp, agile, perceptive, swift, even impatient, but also sensitive and vulnerable, like quick flesh. Quick fictions are funny, poignant, dark, sad, romantic, strange: they take us to the very quick of things.
Flash fiction is flash in the pan; quick fiction is life itself. The term “quick fiction” plays on and off the strange, seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of the real and fictive, life and writing. A quick fiction is not a narrative rushed out like a telegram, tweet or text message: it is a product of labour and love, a brief work composed, revised, sharpened and tightened, in order to be enduring and memorable, something to carry with you everyday.’
The Quick Fictions app, a collaboration between the University of Sussex, Aimer Media and Myriad Editions, showcases the finest quick fictions from the last three years and will continue to grow as new stories are submitted.
‘This is a nifty idea.’ – Guardian
‘The stories all pack a punch beyond their 300 word limit.’ – The Literary Platform
Quick Fiction has been around at the University of Sussex, in the form of annual reading events, since the noughties. It’s also been on the road, featuring at numerous festivals or special events, for example at York, Norwich, Camberwell and Oxford. For some years, also, it was an app, produced as a collaboration between the University of Sussex, Myriad Editions and Aimer Media. It is now most readily accessed via the website https://quickfiction.co.uk/
The most recent Quick Fictions event took place on 9 December 2020. Due to the pandemic, it was recorded ‘live’ on Zoom, and you can find it here.
Over the past decade the term ‘quick fiction’ has gained currency in academic writing. There is an excellent discussion of this and related developments in Marc Botha’s essay ‘Microfiction’ in The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus (Cambridge University Press, 2016). ‘Quick fiction’ has been used as a synonym for ‘flash fiction’ and viewed as a form of ‘microfiction’; but there is also something distinctive and singular about the name and how it works. You can read more in an essay called ‘Quick Fiction: Some Remarks on Writing Today’, published in the Canadian journal Mosaic.
Quick fiction is a life story. ‘Quick’ means living, alive, endowed with life. As in the Biblical couple, ‘the quick and the dead’. And then it also has figurative senses: quick is lively, burning strongly, sharp, piercing, fast-flowing, alert, active, keenly perceptive, agile, prompt to learn, think or understand, intelligent, full of vigour or energy, speedy, rapid, swift, impatient, hot-tempered, sudden as in a sharp change of direction or quick turn. Those are among the many possibilities of this little word. To which we must also add: ‘quick’ as in at the heart or quick of the thing, the most sensitive or touchy part. The idea of quick fiction brings all of these into play.
And at the same time ‘quick fiction’ activates thinking about paradox and contradiction: after all, it sounds like an oxymoron, mixing life (the quick) with what is not real (fiction). In this respect, too, it figures as a distinct and provoking form of ‘life writing’ or ‘inventive autobiography’.
Hamlet says: ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams’ (Act 2, scene 2, lines 254-5). He tells us, in this brief sentence, something intimate and extraordinary about his sense of the world, his inner life. Hamlet is a fictional character and he’s not even talking to us (he’s talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and also addressing God); but this doesn’t prevent us from feeling we know as much about Hamlet’s inner life as we feel we do about the inner life of our actual friends and loved ones. Quick fiction aspires to this kind of intimacy. It’s not about striking out and producing some radically new form, but rather, as Hamlet’s single-sentence life story suggests, working within the constraints of what there is, while wishing or hoping for better. With Hamlet’s exclamation in mind, we could say that quick fiction entails a special attentiveness to the art and necessity of compression (in a nutshell), as well as to the strangeness of dreams – whether bad or regal or both at the same time.
Finally, ‘quick fiction’ is not a fixed thing. It’s not the same as when Ben Jonson used the phrase, in his play Volpone, first performed in 1606. Nor is it quite what it was at the first Quick Fictions event at Sussex, around four hundred years later. It is a quick, changing thing. At a time when the phrase ‘post-truth’ is used without any apparent sense of madness or incredulity, at a time when ‘alternative facts’ has become an apparently meaningful phrase, and when in-your-face everyday lying seems no problem for many millions of people even as it leaves others lost for words, a critical thinking and creative practice of quick fiction seems more urgent and necessary than ever.
- Robo_Po
Long the domain of popular science fiction, robots increasingly permeate every aspect of society. How will this impact the creative and performing arts? The Robot Opera (Robo_Op) project, initiated by the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre and supported by Media, Arts and Humanities Knowledge Exchange and the Sussex Humanities Lab, explores the ramifications of robot presence through encounters with music, words, movement, image and operatic performance. The project was launched in June 2017 with a mini-symposium featuring researchers from Sussex, and continued in 2019 with Robot Opera – What's Next?. In June 2021, we worked with a Cleo Mesmer robot manufactured by Engineered Arts, creating a series of short studies exploring otherness and creative engagement with embodied AI. There were two work-in-progress performance events, each followed by a reflective panel discussion. Both events were hybrid in-person/on Zoom.
This Robo_Po event provoked countless questions in the panel discussion and provided the team with plenty to explore in other projects going forward regarding the relationship between poetry and technology. What does poetry mean from the mouth of a robot? What is explored through generative poetry? What is a voice? What is a reading?
The Robo_Op project was conceptualised and led by Evelyn Ficarra. Poets here include Kat Sinclair, Carol Watts, and many others. Panel includes Charlotte Geater, Andrea Haslanger, Kat Sinclair and Jo Lindsay Walton. Chaired by Carol Watts.
- Sussex Poetry Festival
The Sussex Poetry Festival is a rallying point for innovative and avant-garde poetry and poetics in the UK. For a decade the annual festival has been the pre-eminent experimental poetry festival in the country. Organized by faculty and doctoral students at the University of Sussex, the festival has hosted internationally-recognised poets as well as new voices, including first readings by Sussex students who have since gone on to publish their work in important journals and with the most exciting presses. The festival attracts underground poets from across the UK and overseas to perform and discuss their writing alongside local poets of Brighton and the surrounding area.
The festival remains committed to bringing together the most compelling and extraordinary contemporary poetry from around the world, and, alongside the reading series Hi Zero, has helped foster a remarkable community. Committed to cutting-edge practice, as well as equality and diversity, the festival celebrates poets committed to intersectionality, sexual dissidence, feminism, and anti-racism. The festival has no relations with any corporate sponsors or large-scale commercial publishing, but is for poets whose work pushes back against capitalism.
Readers have included Tim Atkins, Lucy Beynon, Sean Bonney, Anne Boyer, Andrea Brady, Brandon Brown, Vahni Capildeo, Imogen Cassels, Christopher Chen, Abigail Child, Amy De'Ath, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Jean-Michel Espitallier, Jack Frost, William Fuller, Honor Gavin, Jean-Marie Gleize, Judith Goldman, Milli Graffi, Alan Halsey, Lee Harwood, Alan Hay, Ian Heames, Jeff Hilson, Lisa Jeschke, Bhanu Kapil, Reem Kubba, Tom Leonard, Peter Manson, D. S. Marriott, Rod Mengham, Drew Milne, Geraldine Monk, Alistair Noon, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Dell Olsen, Richard Owens, Ian Patterson, Holly Pester, J.H. Prynne, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Monika Rinck, Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Alison Rumfitt, Connie Scozzaro, Sam Solomon, Verity Spott, Eirik Steinhoff, Timothy Thornton, Cassandra Troyan, Jackie Wang, Carol Watts, Alli Warren, Adam Weg, Liao Yiwu, Steve Zultanski.
The festival was forced into a hiatus by Covid-19.
The festival was founded in 2010 by Sara Crangle, Daniel Kane, and Keston Sutherland. Over the decade it was organised variously by Natalia Cecire, Sara Crangle, Daniel Kane, Sam Ladkin, Joe Luna, Samuel Solomon, and Keston Sutherland.
The festival continues to be sponsored by the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought at the University of Sussex. It has also received funding from the Centre for Modernist Studies, and the School of English, both at the University of Sussex.
Past notices can be seen at https://sussexpofest.wordpress.com/
- Sussex Writes
Sussex Writes is an outstanding outreach project, dedicated to making communities of creative writers and exploring the place of creative exchange in building resilience and possibility. Led by Emma Newport, it was established in 2017and connects with secondary schools, youth charities and other community organisations across the region. Having previously worked with over 15 schools in the Sussex region, currently, Sussex Writes is running pilots of online tutoring with the Ormiston Academy network, which includes 40 schools and approximately 30,000 pupils, and with the Red Balloon Centre in Reading, an organisation that specialises in educating young people who have self-excluded from or otherwise left mainstream education.
Picking up on creative possibilities with other partners, from the Big Sing! with Glyndebourne and East Sussex Music, to the Orlando Project at Charleston, Sussex Writes has expanded its capacity to work in further forms of writing engagement, included funded literacy projects, and most recently working during Covid lockdown internationally with Kenya's Youth Cafe. This has led to a major SSRP-IDCF funded project in the Sussex Sustainability Research programme, focusing on youth mental health in the global south. Emma's work with Sussex Writes and the students who participate in taking it forward is notable for its use of creative methodologies to strengthen community engagement, raise attainment, and work co-creatively with marginalised and disadvantaged groups, including helping young people develop psychosocial and interpersonal and employability skills, for which she received the Sussex Better World Award in 2020.
Website: sussexwrites.org
Blog: https://sussexwrites.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SussexWrites
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/sussexwrites/
- Writing Ecologies
Colleagues across the School of Media, Arts and Humanities are engaged in environmental research, exploring relations to creative forms of practice, including writing:
Landlines: British Nature Writing
Since 2017, Will Abberley has been a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded research project Land Lines, which traces the development of nature writing in Britain from 1789 to the present. Taking a historicist approach to literary genre, the project interrogates British nature writing's complex, contradictory relationship to discourses of modernity, identity and environment. The project seeks to challenge common perceptions of this genre as politically and aesthetically 'conservative' or 'naive'. It also seeks to counter a USA-centric emphasis in scholarship on nature writing, examining how British contexts have shaped tendencies and resonances distinct from the North American tradition. Will and his co-researchers have produced a monograph on the topic, due for publication with Cambridge University Press in Autumn 2021. In 2017, Will organised an exhibition and series of public lectures on ornithology and literature at Brighton's Booth Museum of Natural History, featuring a talk by the nature writer Mark Cocker. Will appeared on a segment of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme to promote the exhibition. The project also involved a public poll to find the nation’s favourite nature book, which was mentioned on the BBC’s Autumn Watch and also promoted by a professionally produced video, presented by Will. The poll was won by Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, an event that won media coverage from newspapers such as The Daily Express, The Independent, The Belfast Telegraph and The Sunday Post. In 2018, Will presented a BBC Radio 3 ‘Proms Extra’ discussion panel on ‘The British Countryside, Real and Imagined’ with the nature writer and novelist Melissa Harrison and archaeologist Francis Pryor. In 2019, Will also presented a 45-minute feature for Radio 3 Into the Eerie, which explored the aesthetic category of eeriness in the work of contemporary artists interested in environment and landscapes. Further, in collaboration with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, two public events were held at the Flamborough Head Living Seas Centre in Bridlington: a public talk and reading by the acclaimed nature writer Philip Hoare, and a family fun day.
Land Lines culminated in the 2019 conference Nature Writing’s Future Pasts.
Will Abberley speaks about the Landlines hunt for the UK’s favourite nature book:
Veering
Nicholas Royle’s research and teaching interests in writing and the environment go back many years. His ground-breaking study The Uncanny (2003) is about the idea that the uncanny is ‘a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was “part of nature”: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world’. The concept of the uncanny remains a key point of reference for writers and theorists concerned with environmental questions. Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011) explores the figure of veering at the heart of ‘environment’ (from the French verb virer, to turn or veer). It seeks to deconstruct the idea that the environment turns around us, humans, and to elucidate the ways in which veering both is and is not peculiar to the human. (The cover of the book, for example, shows a Galapagos green turtle veering.) Royle’s work on veering has been taken up by other scholars in the field, such as in the collection of essays Veer Ecology: A Companion to Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Lowell Duckert (2017).
Royle has also experimented with the novel-form as a means of exploring what we understand by ‘the environment’. Quilt (2010) is a novel about the death of the father, the nature of rays (especially Manta rays), and the experience of deep time. The Afterword to the novel (‘Reality Literature’) addresses the challenges of fiction-writing when, among other things, ‘the environment of the planet is being systematically and rapidly destroyed, and non-human animal species are being wiped out daily’. An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017) is a novel about climate crisis and birds. It broods on the deep affinities and connections between the human and avian – physically, spiritually, musically, erotically. Affirming the radical otherness of birds, the novel also engages with the view that (in Peter C. Doherty’s celebrated phrase) ‘their fate is our fate’. Listen to a conversation about this book with the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
More recently, Royle has turned to forms of more explicitly autobiographical writing. Mother: A Memoir (2020) explores the links between the author’s memories of his mother and the figures of Mother Nature and Mother Earth at a time of climate emergency and mass extinctions. Watch his recent lecture in the University of Lille series, Toward/ To Ward Off/Extinction, ‘fl: Reflections on Life Abbreviated’, on what it is to ‘flourish’.
Royle is currently working on a Covid-19 diary in collaboration with the ecologist and philosopher Timothy Morton. They discussed their work on this at an event as part of the inaugural Sussex Festival of Ideas in June 2021.
Walking in Air
Carol Watts' practice as a poet often draws on site specific projects, collaborative work with sound artists working with field recordings, and critical/creative investigations of place and environment, 'explorations by legwork' in Deleuze's terms.
It has included Zeta Landscape, a poetry project based on prime numbers and the counting of sheep on a Welsh hill farm at lambing time, part anthologised in The Ground Aslant.
Her most recent collection Kelptown explores the stakes of living in a time of climate catastrophe and inundation, and the multispecies communities of kelp forests. She is particularly interested in what might be understood as the acoustic ecologies of poetry.
She is currently collaborating on a project Walking in Air, led by Will Montgomery and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, with artists and composers from the Wandelweiser Group, which responds to Tim Ingold's account of 'Footprints through the weather-world' in its documenting of a practice of walking. The project will culminate in 2022 at the Centre des livres d'artists (CDA) in St Yrieix, France. Her practice focuses on the coming and going of seasonal ponds.