Profile
Dr. Richard A Carter is a Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York. Carter’s academic practice investigates the more-than-human as it manifests across technical activities, objects, and environments.
Research
Carter’s subject expertise encompasses Digital Art and Culture (the cultural, social, and political impacts of digital technologies, specialising in historic and contemporary digital arts practices, environmental sensing and impacts, science and technology studies, media archaeology, and gaming cultures); Digital Storytelling (digital writing and storytelling practices, virtual environments, gaming and simulation); Digital Creativity and Design (creative coding, web design, speculative and imaginary media).
Carter’s work addresses questions concerning how digital art and literature are shaping the future of writing and storytelling, and how they provide insights into more-than-human modes of perception, knowledge, and agency. Carter focuses especially on the relationships between digital systems and the environment, examining the role of art in telling different stories about these relationships. Critically informed speculation, experimentation, indeterminacy, and possibility are a cornerstone of Carter’s research practice, which engages a wide range of technologies, formats, and modes—including drones and satellites, machine vision, generative algorithms, poetic text, and virtual worlds.
Carter’s creative-critical outputs have been anthologised and published by numerous presses that are interested in contemporary and experimental writing practices, such as Guillemot Press, Paperview Books, Poetrishy, code::art, Filter, Taper, The Mouth of a Lion, Seeing in Tongues, and others.
Carter is a Co-Investigator on a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project led by Dr. Beryl Pong at the Centre for Drones and Culture, in association with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge: “Droned Life: Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking”. The project investigates contemporary public understandings of drone technologies across the domestic and security spheres. Working in partnership with the Imperial War Museum Institute, Drone Wars UK, and Human Studio, the project will generate outputs that showcase how research-led virtual reality artworks can explicate and support the evolving relationships between drone technology and wider society.
Carter is also a Co-Investigator on an AHRC BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) funded project led by Dr. Joanna Tidy at the University of Sheffield: “Museum Visitor Experience and the Responsible use of AI to Communicate Colonial Collections”. This project is working with Leeds Royal Armouries to scope how AI can be used thoughtfully and responsibly to help investigate and ultimately communicate the colonial histories threaded throughout its collection—engaging head-on the biases these technologies reproduce, especially when working with such material, and exploring how they may yet help to tell these important stories in ways that enrich the visitor experience.
Carter can be contacted using his work email, or via Twitter-X, Mastodon, BlueSky, or LinkedIn.
This website has been preserved in the UK Web Archive since 2020.
Academic Bio
As an undergraduate, Carter studied BA English with Media at University College Falmouth, graduating in 2010 with First Class honours. He pursued subsequently an Master’s in English at the University of Exeter, specialising in Criticism and Theory, and graduated from this with Distinction in 2011.
It was during his Master’s that Carter began exploring the relations between computing technology, creative expression, and more-than-human agency within the context of digital literary practices, making this the subject of his final dissertation. In 2012 Carter was awarded an AHRC doctoral studentship in Science, Technology, and Culture to develop his research on this topic for his PhD thesis, “Textual Entanglements: A Performative Approach towards Digital Literature”, supervised by Prof. Regenia Gagnier (Exeter), Prof. Laura Salisbury (Exeter), and Dr. Matt Hayler (Birmingham). In April 2016 Carter passed his viva voce, examined by Prof. N. Katherine Hayles (Duke) and Prof. Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter).
After completing his PhD, Carter lectured on the BSc Interactive Media programme at the University of York, convening and delivering modules across all three years of the taught programme. For his delivery, Carter was nominated by senior staff in 2018 for the York Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award, and was also nominated by students, and then shortlisted, for the YUSU Excellence Awards under the category of “Teacher of the Year”.
In 2018 Carter was appointed as a Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Roehampton, taking a leading role in developing and delivering the first iteration of the all-new BA Digital Media degree. In 2020, Carter became the Programme Convenor for this degree, and in 2021 was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Digital Media. Carter was nominated subsequently for an Aimhigher London Practitioner Award for supporting school students and families in their engagement and understanding of Higher Education.
In 2022, Carter was appointed as a Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York, leading the development and inaugural delivery of the new taught MA Digital Media and Culture degree, launching in Autumn 2023.