Darren Gary Berkland
Darren Gary Berkland (PhD) (see also https://www.darrida.co.uk/) is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at Ulster University’s School of Communication and Media, located on the Coleraine campus in Northern Ireland. Berkland’s research primarily explores interfaces, screens and gestures within a broader social context, using critical research methods to examine the relationship between the individual and increasingly pervasive digital assemblages. Add to this research exercises in the fields of immersive production, projection mapping and creative coding that draws upon a phenomenology of space and the work of Vilém Flusser. Furthermore, Berkland specialises in repurposing defunct or legacy technologies – ranging from outdated hardware to obsolete software platforms—to create innovative and unexpected new experiences. This work spans collaborations with students, artists, and enterprise clients, breathing new life into forgotten tech, transforming it into tools for expression, exploration, and engagement. It is a practice that blends the nostalgia of digital tools with cutting-edge creativity.
Articles of Darren Gary Berkland
Flusser’s Selfies
Gesture is a concept through which Vilém Flusser tackles one of phenomenology’s most challenging and enduring complexities: the body. However, this paper argues that he does not do so through a thorough, philosophically complex, and methodologically succinct theorising of the body. Instead, it provides the provocation that Flusser demonstrates the body’s place within phenomenology through the creation of a series of written self-portraits, in which the function and arrangement of perception operate in a mode most readily recognised in the contemporary media form known as the selfie. These selfie-essays do not simply articulate where a body sits within the phenomenological method but also provide detailed methodological consideration of how the body is articulated in perception and how its movements arrange perception (like a selfie-taker seeing him/herself in a mirror). This paper does so by situating Flusser’s Gestures within the phenomenological work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and then conducting a formal analysis of Flusser’s selfies. I then demonstrate how this theorising allows us to extend Flusser’s work on gesture, the body, and phenomenology into his work on the apparatus and the technical image via the sinuous and slippery concept of affect [Gestimmtheit]; ultimately raising questions of freedom and how the arrangement of structures of perceptions plays against deterministic misreadings of his apparatus theory.
Gestural translations from within the (post)digital: a Flusserian analysis of phonic gestures
Bridging the gap between Vilém Flusser’s theorising around language and work on gesture, this paper will examine the collection of gestures that form a constituent ‘vocabulary’ of our mobile phone use. The presented research examines a wide array of gestural taxonomies that take the form of dictionaries and notations which have been used in attempts to define such developing vocabularies. However, the paper is critical of these taxonomies as it argues they reveal a central problematic at the heart of any gestural vocabularies: the reduction of the body into the biomechanical; an assortment of weighted pulleys and levers. As a result of this, these gestural taxonomies are shown to create technical images of the body reducing it further to nothing more than a functionary of an apparatus. In response to these limitations implicit within such taxonomies, the paper reconsiders today’s developing gestural language in terms of the writing of Flusser. It argues that his work allows for gesture to be examined as phenomena, and in viewing these gestures as situated and witnessed phenomena, it becomes possible to perceive of them not simply as symbolic movements of the body, but rather as a form of translation. The paper then argues that what is being translated through these phonic gestures can be understood as a postdigital condition that has emerged following the alleged end of the digital revolution. To evidence these claims, the paper performs a gestural analysis of Luke Collins’s short film, Swiped (2019) that demonstrates an interaction between two individuals attempting to navigate a peculiar (post)digital situation.