Profile
Dr. Richard A Carter is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York. Carter’s academic practice investigates the material and ecological dimensions of technical artefacts, activities, and environments.
Carter is always open to enquiries and opportunities for collaboration and participation in areas concerning creative digital art, storytelling, and technical possibility within academic and commercial settings.
Carter can be contacted using his work email, or via BlueSky, Twitter-X, Mastodon, or LinkedIn.
This website has been preserved in the UK Web Archive since 2020.
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 writing are shaping the future of storytelling, and how they can 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 and artificial intelligence, 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.