Haunted Network Research Initiative

This video-lecture presents an experimental theory-fiction film that investigates “Weirding” as a methodological process within contemporary philosophy and artmaking. Drawing on traditions of weird fiction, magic, and interdisciplinary critical theory, the film operates as both a critical text and a creative artefact—foregrounding the generative role of disorientation, ambiguity, and liminality in artistic research.

Rather than treating the Weird as a fixed genre or thematic concern, the project explores it as a mode of becoming: a continuous negotiation between bodies, disciplines, and ontological boundaries. The film proposes that Weirding resists normative trajectories of meaning-making and instead embraces contingency, failure, and non-linearity as productive forces in creative inquiry. Through a blend of scripted reflection, fictionalised research, and visual abstraction, it seeks to re-map the terrain of experimental methodology beyond rigid academic or genre-based expectations.

In doing so, this work contributes to current debates in practice-based research, posthuman aesthetics, and speculative realism, offering Weirding as a framework for imagining new futures, methodologies, and artistic solidarities across disciplinary lines.

The Haunted Network Research Initiative is an organisation dedicated to archiving and preserving the work of the artist Cameron Dodds. Through research, collaboration, and cybernetic strega-hacking the HNRI aims to contextualise Dodds’ work and the aesthetic realm surrounding it. The HNRI are currently in the process of willing themselves into existence.

Cameron Dodds (1991-2021[?]) is/was a British composer and academic whose work spans/spanned an array of disciplines including theory, film, visual art, and
fiction writing. He has been/was commissioned by institutions such as Gaudeamus Music Festival, The Eden Project, The National Opera Studio, and LOD Muziektheater.
His work is often concerned with the process in which fictions make themselves real and folkloric practices. In 2016 he was awarded the
Tracey Chadwell Memorial Prize and in 2019 the Sound and Music Seed Award.

www.hnri.xyz