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The Derek Jarman Lab

@jarmanlab

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We teach and produce films @birkbeckuol.

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Please join us for a talk and workshop by artist Wanrong Zhu, one of the first events hosted by Birkbeck’s new Centre for Creative AI (CCAI). All are are welcome and the registration link is available in the bio☝️

Wanrong Zhu: Artist Talk and AI Workshop
Thursday 16 July 6:30pm

The Birkbeck Centre for Creative AI is pleased to welcome artist and filmmaker Wanrong Zhu for an artist talk and practical workshop exploring the creative possibilities and critical questions raised by contemporary AI image and video generation.

Working across documentary practice, photography and generative AI, Zhu develops hybrid approaches to visual storytelling that combine lived experience with speculative imagination. Her work explores how emerging technologies might reshape relationships between people, place, memory and cultural identity, using AI not to document reality but to imagine possible futures.
The talk will focus on Symbiotic Ethnography, an ongoing artistic project inspired by Zhu’s upbringing in Yunnan, one of China’s most ethnically diverse regions. Combining documentary photography with AI-generated imagery, the project asks how future technologies might become part of existing cultural landscapes and what forms of coexistence between humans, machines and local traditions might be imagined. Rather than presenting predictions about cultural change, the work uses speculative visual narratives to explore one artist’s perspective on the relationship between heritage, technology and the future.

Following the talk, Zhu will lead a workshop introducing participants to professional AI video production workflows using ComfyUI. Participants will learn techniques for character replacement, motion transfer and hybrid live-action/AI video production, gaining insight into the creative pipeline behind contemporary generative video practice—from preparing source footage and guiding motion to rendering and post-production compositing.
Bringing together artistic experimentation, technical practice and critical discussion, this event offers an opportunity to explore both the creative potential and the conceptual questions surrounding AI-generated visual media. by @jarmanlab

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3 months ago

We are pleased to announce that our latest production, Turning Points, has four upcoming screenings in London. We would love for you to join us—please come and bring your friends!

Rio Cinema
Thursday 9 July • 1 PM – 3 PM

Ritzy Cinema and Cafe
Tuesday 14 July • 2 PM – 4 PM

Prince of Peckham Pub
Wednesday 15 July • 6 PM – 8:30 PM

Bernie Grant Arts Centre
Wednesday 22 July • 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

More info and details in Bio!👆 by @jarmanlab

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3 months ago

by @jarmanlab

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4 months ago

by @jarmanlab

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4 months ago

A huge thank you to Mel Deerson and Donatella Della Ratta for delivering two fantastic events at the new @birkbeckdigital venue within the Centre for Creative AI. by @jarmanlab

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4 months ago

Date: 19 June
Time: 7pm
Venue: Birkbeck Central, Centre for Creative AI
Book your place link in bio. TWO DREAM GARDENS: A SCREENING AND TALK BY MEL DEERSON

In the season of poppies, join Mel Deerson for a talk on poppies and visionary dreaming in Derek Jarman’s work, and a screening of her two short experimental films: The Dream of the Mirror and The Dream of the Empty Garden.

Visionary gardens form a long tradition, from the biblical Song of Solomon, to the medieval hortus conclusus and the Romance of the Rose, to Jarman’s The Garden. The Dream of the Mirror (2025) takes Jarman’s garden as a starting point for a visionary journey through poppies, medieval mystic texts, mirrors and the sea. The Dream of the Empty Garden (2026) is a circling, unsettling, darker vision, filmed entirely at night. What happens when you transplant the mystic garden into an Australian setting, where the artist is from? On stolen land taken by violence and fenced off from its original custodians, the walled garden becomes less of a paradise and more of a prison.

Mel Deerson’s films are shot for close to zero budget on phones and laptop cameras, using primarily DIY, in-camera effects and accompanied by music made by the artist. Created with friends and accompanied by poems, publications, educational programs and talks, Deerson’s films form part of a lo-fi but vibrant creative ecosystem which draws on Derek Jarman’s methods: DIY, improvisation, experimentation, making and sharing with others, and a focus on process. Mel Deerson lives in Australia and is currently completing their PhD at UNSW.
The Dream of the Mirror was commissioned by UNSW Galleries as a contemporary response to the exhibition Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days.

The Dream of the Empty Garden was made with the assistance of the Derek Jarman Lab, and was commissioned by the Monash University Museum of Art for their exhibition Knowing Otherwise.

This project is supported by the University of NSW and an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. by @jarmanlab

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4 months ago

Date: 22 June
Time: 7pm
Venue: Birkbeck Central, The Centre for Creative AI
Book your place link in bio.
ASK ME FOR THOSE UNBORN PROMISES THAT MAY SEEM UNLIKELY TO HAPPEN IN THE NATURAL #5

by Donatella Della Ratta,
in collaboration with The Void (Tommaso Campagna & Jordi Viader Guerrero)
duration: 32 mins
language: English

Generative AI creates speculative visuals that, while not based on factual events, remain plausible, constructing realities that have yet to unfold. Situated within the domain of possibility rather than empirical certainty, these visuals introduce a new form of ‘synthetic realism’. By reshaping both past and present through their world-building potential, these seemingly innocuous images—detached from tangible references, historical ties, lineage, or context—wield a quiet yet profound violence against history and factuality. The lecture performance examines ‘speculative violence,’ a developing mode of the image’s existence that oscillates between overt destruction and subtle, almost imperceptible effects. Blending text with visuals—including found footage, social media threads, and AI-generated media—the piece takes the audience on an unsettling journey through the violence of the not-yet-realized, traversing landscapes from Palestine to Trump’s America, and implicating oblivious cows. by @jarmanlab

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4 months ago

Join us for the first screening of our latest doc TURNING POINTS on 6 May, 6pm in the Birkbeck Cinema at #bbkartsweek by @jarmanlab

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6 months ago

Premiere of our new doc at Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2026!

When: 06 May 2026, 18:00 — 20:00
Venue: Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square

“Turning Points” is a documentary study of the journeys taken by Black and working-class academics into health research, and of their views on the significance of lived experience and social identity in the production of knowledge. The film follows the lives of Dr Sharon Cox, Professor Amaka Offiah, Tomi Akingbade, and Professor Helen Minnis, bringing together their memories and reflections on the paths that led them to academic excellence. The screening is followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and the subjects of the film.

The film is made by Bartek Dziadosz and Karen Wells and Haroon Forde.

It is an outcome of the IFRC-funded project New Knowledge Producers. taken in Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square by @jarmanlab

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6 months ago

We still have places left for our short course Audio-visual Practice as Research starting this Friday, 6th March.

Four full days: 6, 13, 20, 27 March. In person at the Lab in Bloomsbury. Sign up link in Bio.

This Audio-Visual Practice as Research short course teaches you how to effectively use moving images in the context of academic research. You will examine the genre of the essay film and other types of filmmaking that lend themselves to a research-led approach, such as documentary, videographic criticism, video art, ethnographic film and digital anthropology. You will also learn how to use widely available digital equipment, including Panasonic GH6 and GH5 cameras, smartphones, audio recording equipment and free editing software such as Blackmagic Davinci Resolve, and explore such practical aspects of film production as writing treatments, copyright regulations and distribution. taken in 43 Gordon Square by @jarmanlab

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7 months ago

Join us for the free event hosted by BIMI and Jarman Lab on 13 February at 6.30pm, Birkbeck Cinema. 43 Gordon Square.

De-Generated explores the question of human agency against the backdrop of the rapidly expanding creative use of AI-generated imagery.

The event will feature the first public screening of a new essay film by Bartek Dziadosz, Close Cuts, followed by a programme of short films created using AI models and a panel discussion.

Programme

Close Cuts by Bartek Dziadosz

Close Cuts is a scrapbook visual essay that revisits the films of Agnès Varda and Lého Galibert-Laîné, tracing their fragmentary aesthetic and exploring their paradoxical affinity with the architecture of neural networks. It introduces the term essayistic découpage as a way of describing a particular method of critical practice.

Call Me When You Get There, Act I: Data Haunted by Magritte’s Ghost and Act II: An Uncanny Dialogue by Donatella Della Ratta and Alessandro Turchioe.

Call Me When You Get There is a theory-driven video essay series in three acts that interrogates artificial intelligence from the extractive infrastructures of data and human labor that sustain it, to the ways it operates as an epistemic engine, producing new regimes of reality and truth. Act I reflects on the shifting ontology of the image under AI. What does representation become when language turns into code and images detach from lived experience, from matter, from world? Act II extends this inquiry through a fictional conversation staged between two unlikely interlocutors: Roland Barthes, via Camera Lucida, and a contemporary artist-entrepreneur whose essays celebrate AI’s world-making potential.

The Rock Speaks by Amy Louise Wilson and Francois Knoetze

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, a rare earth mineral that is essential in the production of technologies. In this hybrid AI documentary, South African artists Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson, together with Congolese historian Joe-Yves Salankang Sa-Ngol, trace the trans-continental journey of this precious metal. taken in Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square by @jarmanlab

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8 months ago

A Wearable Canvas. Recce in Japan. Supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. YT link in bio for a longer video 👆#wearablecanvas #culturalexchange #japan by @jarmanlab

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a year ago