Past Seminars

The Music Building, 4 - 6 July 2017 -  9am - 5pm

This conference considered The American New Wave’s cultural, political and aesthetic legacies fifty years since its birth. It looked afresh at the films produced during its short lifespan and assess their continued significance. It explored the films these directors produced in the years after 1980 to consider how far the values and ideals of the earlier period persisted or whether they were subsumed by the cultural conservatism that has dominated mainstream cinema since then. It investigated those filmmakers we might consider to have picked up the baton from their predecessors and pursued challenging material in more recent times.

Mathias Hall, Music Building, October 10, 2018, 1pm-2pm

Agent Based Modelling (ABM) involves designing computational models for simulating the interactions of autonomous agents. This talk will describe Agent Inspired Design (AID) which uses agent based models for simulating the design process and helping to inspire creative designs.

This talk will first review the use of Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries, with a specific focus on the use of agent based modelling. Then it will define what AID is and why we need it, and explain how we can accomplish an AID process. It will then describe a novel morphogenetic method for AID that uses a simple reactive agent-based model defined by stimulus-response rules (where perception is directly coupled to action). The talk will show how the method can be used to reproduce various patterns produced by cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, L-systems, fractals, boids and shape grammars as well as showing how many more creative designs can be produced by adding mutations to the design process. Finally, the talk will then discuss several current research projects to show how this new morphogenetic AID process can be used to help inspire creative designs for diverse areas such as digital art, music, animation for games and films, artificial life, and artificial intelligence.

Alun Building, November 8, 2018, 5pm-6pm

Wil Aaron is a pioneer in the world of television, having worked as an independent director and producer. He established the television company ‘Ffilmiau’r Nant’ in 1976, which produced such programmes as Hel Straeon, Sgorio and C’mon Midffild for S4C. Before that, he worked as a director for the BBC programmes 24 Hours and Midweek. He will talk about his experiences in war zones such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The reporter in many of the films he shot there was Max Hastings, at the start of a remarkable career which culminated in the editorship of The Telegraph. The talk coincides with the publication of Max’s definitive history of the war, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975.

21st December 2020, 9-6.30 p.m. UK Time.

Conceived by Kirk Douglas and executed by Stanley Kubrick, it is still considered one of the best examples of its genre. To mark sixty years since the release of Spartacus, this virtual conference considers the making and impact of this crucial film. Spartacus has left an indelible mark on our popular culture and has been much mimicked as well as parodied. But its exact position with Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre has been misunderstood with some critics and academics excluding it from his canon. Consequently, it has not been subjected to the same scrutiny from a wide variety of disciplines and methodological perspectives as his other films. This conference brings together a global community of scholars and fans from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to explore Spartacus sixty years since its release, discuss its impact and consider its position within Kubrick’s oeuvre and the wider visual and socio-political culture.

Topics include the film’s origins, influences, production, aesthetics, themes, representations, publicity, reception, afterlife, legacy, and where the film sits in Kubrick’s and Douglas’ wider body of work.

For further information please contact the organisers.

Spartacus@60 has been organised by Professor Nathan Abrams, Professor in Film, Bangor University (n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk); Dr. James Fenwick Senior Lecturer in Media, Sheffield Hallam University (j.fenwick@shu.ac.uk) and Dr. Elisa Pezzotta, Independent Scholar (elisa.pezzotta@virgilio.it).