Creative R&D Issues 1-40: The Recap
This week: A recap of issues #1–40 // Expanded highlights from the archive // Plus: Mad Max, mythmaking, and the time-image
Forty newsletters deep to look back on. I’m so glad we got here.
The first edition of Creative R&D went out in September 2023. Since then, we’ve looked at digital museums, meme aesthetics, disappearing art, spatial computing, algorithmic sound, generative fashion, and the uncanny futures of screen architecture.
At the core has been the idea that something new is emerging between art, research and technology. But it’s unstable, hybrid and half-formed. The only way to see it clearly is to move with it—issue by issue, practice by practice, signal by signal.
That’s what this recap edition is for.
This issue ends a cycle (our fourth), ahead of a new run beginning next week. And because of a tech hiccup, last week’s essay on the mythos of Mad Max didn’t reach all subscribers—so we’re reprinting it below in full.
Let’s go.
IDEAS: All the world is blood
Furiosa, last year’s fifth Mad Max movie, lost $120 million.
That’s not the point.
Mad Max is the most sustained act of cinematic mythmaking in our lifetime — a ritual sequence etched into metal, bodies, and sand. Not a franchise in the Marvel sense. Something older. More circular. A myth that repeats, sheds skin, and returns.
Every film in the sequence tells the same story: civilisation collapses, a woman leads the way out, Max wanders on. But the materials mutate. The textures shift. The technologies rust.
This is cinema as recurrence. A cracked loop in the desert.
Like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Miller’s saga loops through desert horror, violence, and rebirth. Both McCarthy and Miller write in blood and sand, repeating acts of brutal beauty that circle the void but never resolve it. We don’t watch these stories. We enter them, again and again.
But the important thing about Mad Max is: he didn’t come from high culture. He came from the edge. A 1979 Australian B-movie made with no money, no time, no studio plan. Shot with ex-doctors, wannabe bikers, and a then-unknown Mel Gibson. The original Mad Max was all speed and abrasion — DIY editing, handheld chaos, and a vision of the end made entirely out of junkyard parts.
By Fury Road, the world had grown around it. The scale got huge. But the engine remained the same. A delirious choreography of machines, violence, and ritual — where every part of the set becomes mythic. The steering wheels are totems. The flamethrower guitar is a relic. Technologies don’t vanish. They become ritual.
We said this in issue #20, looking at Edward Burtynsky’s industrial ruins. We saw it in issue #25, in the Backrooms aesthetic — low-res horror turned into cultural dreamspace. It’s there in issue #21, with Demon Slayer, where anime stylisation transforms trauma into timeless loop.
Mad Max is all of that. But physical. Felt. Dirty. You can smell the petrol.
And like Deleuze’s time-image, what matters here is not plot or consequence, but pressure. Duration. Accumulation. George Miller is no longer just a director — he’s a technician of time. And if Deleuze thought that mantle belonged to Resnais or Antonioni, then Fury Road proves that today, it’s held by Miller, Nolan, Villeneuve and the most radical action filmmakers alive.
But let’s not forget: this is still a film where a man strapped to a truck screams through the desert while playing a flame guitar. There’s joy in the excess. That’s the point. It’s myth as spectacle, not message.
Which is why the failure of Furiosa at the box office doesn’t feel like an ending. If anything, it’s a reminder. These films don’t operate on a linear plane. They’re like dreams or rituals. They circle. They break form and rebuild. Each time, the same. Each time, different.
Like Max himself: they come from nowhere, speak little, disappear when the work is done.
Signal Returns
A thematic recap of issues #1–40, structured by core obsessions
✦ Infrastructure + Imaginaries
#5: Portals: Museums, metaverses, and the architecture of digital twins
#6: Portals II: Immersive museums and the end of the social media curve
#11: Making Darkness Visible: The physical internet revealed—data centres, fibre trenches, and telecom towers
#38: No Rush Upon the Road to Heaven: Scenario planning for infrastructure futures and cultural collectivity
✦ Rituals, Ghosts + Lost Futures
#16: Project Somnacin: Aureia Harvey and the fragility of early net art
#24: No-Clipping Out of Reality: YouTube horror, the Backrooms, and uncanny space as collective fiction
#35: Haunted by Lost Futures: Mark Fisher, CCK philosophy, hauntology, and AI’s retroactive dreams
✦ Bodies, Performance + Motion
#7: Free Your Mind: Matrix ballet, Factory International, and digitised movement
#17: More Songs About Buildings and Food: HoloTile floors, architecture as AR interface, and smart rings as wearable cinema
#26: The Return of the Repressed: Hardcore revival, rave ritual, and Suno/Udio as AI music machines
✦ Meme Cultures + the Weird Internet
#9: Oh to Escape Utterly: Generative memes, Erosion Birds, and the aesthetic of non-authorship
#14: Ride the Silver Rocket: Pussy Riot and the last utopia of social media
#21: Delirious: Anime aesthetics, sludge media, and smart ring synesthesia
#31: The R&D Lab of Digital Aesthetics: Aesthetics.wiki, Gen Z stylescapes, and the categorisation of vibes
✦ Media + Architecture + the Moving Image
#4: Optimising for Art: Circa, Piccadilly Lights, and advertising space as public art canvas
#12: Making Darkness Visible: LAS Art Foundation, nonhuman audiences, and plants as viewers
#28: Trip II the Moon: Simon Reynolds, “Futuromania,” and how sound becomes myth
✦ Psycho-Aesthetics + Techno-Ecology
#22: Underwater Dancehall: Immersive sound design, Atmos audio, and TV nature as VR experience
#23: An Eagle in Your Mind: Adaptive AI audio, Endel, and the sonic design of sleep
#19: In the Air: Michael Mann, digital cinematography, and post-app interfaces
✦ Game Worlds + Glitch Space
#25: Reinventing Film from the Backrooms: Kane Pixels, TikTok horror, and cinematic DIY
#8: Do Not Pass Go!: Monopoly goes Web3, digital art singularity, and Michelangelo’s sketch bunker
#30: The Mechanics of the Infinite: Gameverse time loops, Minecraft edges, and Starfield as space-time hallucination
What We’re Tracking Next
– Işıl Eğrikavuk whose interactive storytelling works fuse absurdist ritual with feminist performance
– Cecilia Bengolea, choreographing AR dance as postcolonial remix
– Ralf Baecker and his machine-sculptures that make visible the invisible logic of code
– Shu Lea Cheang’s techno-ecosexual work, mixing net art, cyberpunk and fermented worlds
– Rieko Shiga exploring memory and radioactivity through glitch, flame, and broken image
– Takeshi Murata’s maximalist GIF-noise hallucinations. I really, REALLY like him
– Ewa Justka, Polish noise priestess, hacking synths into occult contraptions
– Anicka Yi and her scent-emitting AI biospheres
– Agnes Cameron whose “projects” sit somewhere between generative geometry, recursive computation, and embodied infrastructure
Footnote
The desert doesn’t end. It just changes shape.
I keep thinking about the circularity of creative forms—how we orbit technologies, lose them, then build them into ritual. Think of the tape loop. The broken VHS. The MIDI controller on stage with a jazz drummer. In Blood Meridian, the Judge says the dance goes on, and none of us get to leave.
So here we are again, boots on sand, pixel dust in our mouths, and the signal—barely, beautifully—holding.
See you in #41, where we’re talking Talk Talk.