Adaptation in a post-digital age

• Main Author: Gaunt, Joshua Tristan Jamison
• Other Authors: Hayward, Susan
• Published: University of Exeter 2011
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.547006

The following study charts the research and execution of two film projects that contribute towards my PhD in Film by Practice, Here Lies Lucy: A Vampire Yarn (2008) and Tera Toma (2009). Based on the texts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, these two films are an attempt to breathe new life into the original works, which have been diluted and over-layered with meaning throughout the mechanical age. In the post-digital age, new aesthetic and methodological approaches to film production are emerging which are intended to humanise the digital by both embracing and countering the cold binary technologies that are dominating our lives today. Post-digital filmmakers are attempting to stimulate technology that no longer has any physical relation to the world and by doing so, are creating work that is more self-reflexive and immediate than ever before. Now that we are faced with these new post-digital dimensions, can we create new ways of representing the diluted texts of the past? My PhD by practice attempts to answer this question by investigating post-digital aesthetic and methodological trends that have emerged during the past 15 years in filmmaking and applying them to my own adaptations of past texts. As a result, I have developed new ways of approaching my own work, which contribute to an ever-evolving practical discourse concerned with the humanisation of digital technology in artistic practice.