FilmLab's creative, practice-based work explores a range of artistic approaches to the specific and unique characteristics of film, video and digital media, and aesthetic strategies that transcend different technologies. Other strands of research concern histories of film culture, criticism and film education.
FilmLab comprises artist-filmmakers, critics, and historians. The film and video work produced in this area involves research that attends to a wide range of subjects including landscapes and locations, optics and perception and visual music. The modes of production are equally diverse, involving 16mm film, animation, ‘expanded cinema’, single-frame sequencing, and systems.
Other strands of research in FilmLab concern histories of film culture, criticism and film education in Britain, studies concerning auteurs and independent filmmakers, and histories of experimental film and video. The spaces of overlap between cinema, museums and art galleries, which have been bridged by the moving image, are also a key topic of research.
An emerging research strand in FilmLab focuses on bringing together researchers working with sites, archives and communities.
Outputs of FilmLab are shared with diverse and varied audiences through public screenings and exhibitions, talks, symposia, workshops, articles and publications.
This project explores a range of structures, systems and aesthetic strategies that several British film and video artists have invented and developed in works spanning the late 1960s to the present.
Read more about Experimental Cinema: Structures, Systems and StrategiesNeil Henderson’s films have involved medium-specific investigations of landscape, light and music. Shot in Lincolnshire and Kent, his geographical films have focused on waterways and the meeting of sea and land. Several other films have focused on elementary light sources, including candlelight and the stars of the night sky. Sometimes the images he records are refilmed photographic representations of light. His music films have featured Evan Parker, one of the foremost improvising musicians.
Dr Henry K. Miller specialises in the history of film culture in Britain. Recent publications include DWOSKINO: the gaze of Stephen Dwoskin (2022), co-edited with Rachel Garfield, and the monograph The First True Hitchcock (2022). He is co-director of the Slade Film Project with Brigid Lowe. Recent collaborative projects of theirs include the film Together with Lorenza Mazzetti (2023) and recreations of Thorold Dickinson’s Record of War, originally staged in 1937.
Dr Jennifer Nightingale’s 16mm films have involved translating regional knitting patterns into pre-production scores that she uses to document the places that these patterns derive from. Visiting sites in Cornwall, the Faroe Islands, Norfolk, Yorkshire and Ireland, she has made several suites of films that involve a direct pictorial representation of local heritage in a strikingly new manner that also speaks to the methods of other experimental filmmakers.
Dr Jules O’Dwyer is the author of two recent books exploring questions of space and place in the cinema: The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (2025) and Hotels (2025). His next project will expand his long-standing interest in cinematic space by examining how French and Francophone filmmakers and film theorists have reimagined the relationship between cinema, museums and gallery spaces to negotiate questions of cultural difference.
Dr Simon Payne’s experimental video work explores colour mixing, motion effects and abstract digital aesthetics. His work has shown in festivals, cinemas and art galleries internationally. He curates programmes of experimental film and video with Andrew Vallance, under the banner of Contact. He has also written widely on the field. His monograph Experimental Cinema: Structures, Systems and Strategies will be published in 2026.