On Thursday 1 December 2022, the ‘soft’ launch of the Centre for Creative Technologies took place at the Watershed’s PM Studio. Alongside this, Edward King, the Centre’s co-director, had launched his new monograph, Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures (Bloomsbury 2022), with Rayna Denison, Professor of Film and Digital Arts, as the respondent.
Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures explores the role of twins in contemporary culture – from post-war science fiction to social media ‘twinfluencers’. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.