I wrote and presented the short paper On Alien Subjectivity as an introduction to a screening of my films nou and The Man Who Fell to Millom at the symposium In the Cloud of Unknowing: Encounters with the UFO Phenomena at Mildred’s Lane, Pennsylvania, USA (17-18 July 2024). This was a transdisciplinary symposium convening art practitioners, researchers, theorists, and students interested in the broad spectra of ideas and methods emerging from discourses surrounding the global UFO Phenomenon, with an emphasis on visual culture, cinema, and art as vehicles for the encryption and transmission of liminal phenomena. The symposium came at the end of Robert Williams & Bryan McGovern Wilson’s immersive residency. This was an international convening of researchers and theorists on the UFO phenomenon in its many dimensions—uncanny, folkloric, metaphysical, culturally relative, and beyond language. Tony Ousler also introduced and screened their work. Other contributors included ANDREW ROBINSON & DR. DAVID CLARKE, PROFESSOR JEFFREY J. KRIPAL, ROBERT GEORGE, OLIVIER, CÓILÍN O’CONNELL, AB GORHAM, J. TYLER ODLE, MARK PILKINGTON, PROFESSOR REBECCA KRINKE, AMANDA NEDHAM & JOHN ALLISON, ROBERT COZZOLINO, RICCARDO ZAGORODNEV, RICHARD KLEIN.

Thank you to Alex for facilitating it all…

Abstract: Part of the ongoing fine-art project Peter & nou, nou (2018) is a response to Naomi Mitchison’s feminist science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (Mitchison, 1962). nou is a tale of space travel, hypnosis and transformation in which the protagonist nou leaves her home planet, travels through a kaleidoscopic tunnel only to emerge in the tooth of a child who has been hypnotised by a dentist. By the appropriation of Mitchison’s writings and a subversion of Philip K. Dick’s Voigt-Kampff test (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968) the video performs the well-known science fiction trope of alien invasion, reframing it from a feminist perspective in order to foreground the fluid nature of identity and problematise a human-centred world view.

The Man Who Fell to Millom (2018) is set in Millom, Cumbria (UK) and uses a cut-up technique to suggest an atmospheric alternative dystopian narrative for this post-industrial coastal town. Beginning on a calm shoreline, the video tells the absurd tale of an alien-like creature – perhaps awakened by iron ore mining works or perhaps deliberately hewn from the stone beneath Millom – and the alien humanoid that opposes it.

Both these works offer novel perspectives of ‘alien invasion’ in which the aliens present instigate a kind of alien-human hybridity (with direct consequences for the author/artist) or act as oblique guardians of a human community who have prospered and suffered as a result of industrialisation. Screening of these works side by side was intended to generate discussion around the potential of alien/human kinship.