This practice-led thesis investigates the social-first moving image (Kaufman 2025; Vernallis 2023) as a necropolitical device (Preciado 2014; Mbembe 2003). Proliferating on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Google Maps, the banalisation of the event of death (Rankine 2004; Mroué 2006) through its circulation within the ordinary (Berlant 2006; Joseph 2021) produces a new form of sovereignty: holding power not over one’s mortality but over one’s ability for mourning (McCalden 2024; Rose 1995). Developed through a series of moving image works created between 2021 and 2025, this practice-led thesis identifies three distinct vernaculars through which the social-first moving image sets up a new way of speaking casually about death (Ibrahim 2021; Jurgenson 2019): the diaristic (user-generated daily chronicles), the recursive (algorithmic virality), and the navigational (interactive spatial renderings). Via these vernaculars, an apocalyptic visual rhetoric of the ‘doom scroll’ (Kaye 2024; Shabahang 2024) emerges from discorrelated (Denson 2020), seconds-long videos, creating contemporary oral traditions (Dingsun/Marrs 2021) around the self amidst crisis and narrative collapse (Basar 2022; Rao 2020). But unlike age-old oral traditions that refine and subvert narratives through relay, algorithmic systems co-opt these vernacular techniques of the avant-garde to regurgitate the same and the similar (Chun 2017; Beer 2022) through recursive, entropic mimesis (Downey 2024; Haraway 1997). The event of death (Heidegger 1942; Deleuze 1969) is thus perpetually re-narrativised and recirculated as increasingly banal versions of the same. New kinds of violence are produced through the image-as-spectacle (Sharpe 2023; Žižek 2001), as death is rendered hypervisible yet bland; thus suspending and obviating a true confrontation with death through mourning (Derrida 1993). This practice-led thesis usurps the social-first moving image from its online habitat to transmute its vernaculars into a Deviant Poetics. Reimagining the diaristic as diffraction (Kaiser/Thiele 2019; Barad 2007), the recursive as emergence (Golding 2021; Nail 2019), and the navigational as dislocation (Wilk 2022; El Akkad 2017), an onto-epistemological move is developed through an offline, three- channel moving image installation entitled The (Un)event, which forms the main practice submission. Here, the event of death is neither dissolved into the ordinary, nor recirculated, and navigational gestures no longer serve the annihilation of geographical distance (Solnit 2003). The (Un)event undermines the authority of the first-person perspective (Kholeif 2020), contests the metric of computational repetition (Lyotard 1984), and inhabits the map like a real-world territory (Bratton 2006; Carroll 1893). Developing a lyrical yet critical (Le Melle 2018) form out of the necropolitical violence of the social-first moving image, a Deviant Poetics offers another, significantly different approach to articulating the morosity of the time (Bhattacharyya 2023; Bennani 2020). By producing distinctly cadenced, kinetic, and patterned (Williams 1976; Stein 1936) moving image assemblages (Garza 2021; Hayles 2016), alternative ways of sensing (Fuller/Weizmann 2021) the event of death are enabled through a filmic montage that follows poetic instead of algorithmic logics. In the absence of a better language (Maus 2011), a Deviant Poetics thus develops a new diction for articulating the emergent historical environment (Enwezor/Al Qasimi 2023; Berlant 2006) of the contemporary.

Funder: AHRC [AH/R012679/1 ]