Associate ProfessorChris Chesher

Current research projects: 

• AI image prompts as practice, community, and commodity addresses the operation, meaning and exchange of AI prompts used for creating still images (e.g. Midjourney, Nanobanana, ChatGPT, etc) and for moving images (e.g. OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo)
• Convocations and evocations in virtual reality: examines how things and people are called together in invoked and evocative spaces in games such as Waltz of the Wizard.  
• Robot movement and vision: Seeing Each Other Move: Human, Robotic and AI Vision in Everyday Environments explores how vision and movement are being reconfigured as robotic and AI systems enter social space. Although machine perception has advanced rapidly within engineering and AI research, its implications for human visual culture, embodied experience and everyday social interaction remain under-theorised. As robots and AI-enabled systems increasingly operate in campuses, workplaces and public institutions, new forms of human–robot interaction are emerging that require mutual interpretation of motion, gesture and intent.  

Current research supervisions

• Will Mu How Movements are Trans-Mediated: A Study on Animation in Films Video Games and Robotics
• James Baguley 'Syndicated Enthusiasm: Exploring Brand-Operated Discord Servers in Online Creative Industries'
• Rory Graham (Associate supervisor) Microworlds and Megagames: Interrogating Discourses of Size and Scale in Digital Gaming

Research Degree Completions:

• Dr Conor Spence Emergence and Differentiation: Reconceptualising the Digital Object
• Associate Professor César Alberto Albarrán-Torres, PhD, Encoding chance: a technocultural analysis of
  digital gambling (Principle Supervisor)
• Dr (Adam) Ping-I Ho, PhD, Value in Play: Game Items in Digital Environments (Principle Supervisor)
• Dr Punit Deepak Jagasia, PhD, Everyday struggles: User regulation of privacy, advertising and labour onFacebook (Associate Supervisor)
• Dr Eugenia Lee, PhD, Stories in the data: An analysis of climate change visualisations in online news (Associate Supervisor)