About
Artist / Researcher / Hauntologist
My name is Mick. I’m a photographer and musician. I work under a few different pseudonyms, such as Conflux Coldwell, where sound and vision flow together.
I’m interested in eerie spaces and the machines we use to explore and create them. The ghostly and hallucinatory properties of media. What Mark Fisher called “the technological uncanny”. I try to document things that are in the process of disappearing and I try to understand the role recordings play in our perceptions of time passing.
My work is deliberately multi-modal, from landscape photography and field recording to experimental film and digital art. I write about hauntology and the changing ontology of media technology. I conduct practice research into the creative misuse of old or broken tech, the creative possibilities of new virtual realms, and I make immersive video installations and sound art.
I’m fascinated by time, memory and place. I’m particularly drawn to overlooked parts of cities, industrial, abandoned and liminal spaces. My work often interrogates the strange and unexpected ways machines and media can haunt the changing urban landscape, constantly altering our view of our environment and ourselves.
I work with archival materials, AI, analogue and digital cameras, recording devices and obsolete machines, to make new spectral works from discarded materials. I investigate glitches in perception and the optical unconscious. I like telling disquieting stories with images and noise. I’m an agnostic ghost hunter and amateur time traveller.
I also work as a researcher at the University of Leeds and I’m a founding member of the Urban Exploration techno collective. I have a practice-led PhD in Communication Studies and I’m a critically acclaimed record producer.
"Technical images are phantoms that can give the world, and us, meaning"
Vilem Flusser
Recent Exhibitions & Screenings
Sounds of Dissent
(2024)
Memorex Mori - dir. Michael C Coldwell
Screening and director’s interview / Q&A
Practice-based research symposium on music, sounds and the political.
DCU, Dublin.
Pennine Film Festival (2023) Winner
Views from Sunk Island - dir. Michael C Coldwell
Best Experimental Short
Photography & Memory (2023)
Views from Sunk Island - dir. Michael C Coldwell
Screened as part of symposium at Edinburgh Napier
European Short Film Festival (2022)
Views from Sunk Island - dir. Michael C Coldwell
Official selection
Leeds International Film Festival (2022)
Views from Sunk Island - dir. Michael C Coldwell
Official selection (Yorkshire Short Film Competition)
FUSE Art Space (2019)
Zoetrope audiovisual piece performed live at FUSE in Bradford (as Conflux Coldwell)
Leeds Town Hall (2019)
Lost Leeds: Windows on Time exhibition
Rephotography of Leeds by Michael C Coldwell hung in Brodrick Exhibition Space between February and May 2019
Light Night (2018)
The Remote Viewer
Original multi-screen projection work installed at Treasures of the Brotherton in Leeds.
Left Bank (2017)
Residuum
Solo exhibition featuring photography, video work and live performances
Light Night (2017)
(Re)sounding the City at Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall
Video installation / performance with Scott McLoughlin and School of Music, University of Leeds.
Recent Publications
-
Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Fiction
2024
Bloomsbury
Chapter: The Technological Uncanny: The Role of Memory Prosthetics in Hauntological Practice
-
Convergence
2023
Sage Publishing
Camera Phantasma: Reframing virtual photographies in the age of AI -
Archives: Power, Truth and Fiction
2023
Oxford University Press
Interview contribution to Simon Popple’s chapter entitled Sound and Vision -
Narrating the City
2021
Intellect
Loss in space: Deconstructing urban rephotography
Cover image commission -
Herri Journal
2020
Africa Open Institute
Journal article: The Noise made by Ghosts -
Herri Journal
2020
Africa Open Institute
Photo essay: Everything is Real -
International Journal of Film and Media Arts
2019
Universidade LusófonaJournal article: Re-animating Ghosts: Materiality and memory in hauntological appropriation
-
Unmediated Journal
2019
LSE
Journal article: The Impossible Photograph: Rephotography, slum clearance and the representation of absence -
Aura and Trace: The Hauntology of the Rephotographic Image
2018
Thesis - University of Leeds -
A Window on Time
2018
University of Leeds
Book of photography from Coldwell’s doctoral project on the hauntology of photography. Features essay “Through a glass (plate) darkly”
Research on White Rose -
Failures of Presence
2017
Self published photo book dedicated to Mark Fisher. Features essay “The Eerie and the Banal”
The present moment is just the past mutating into the future, both of which are virtual
Selected Discography
-
Conflux Coldwell - Memorex Mori
SUBEXOTIC RECORDS, 2023
”Tardis telemetry or a sliver of some long-defunct regional television ident... Schofield's pieces subvert the fabric of the VHS medium to illustrate its eeriness" The Wire
”Memorex Mori is quite an unsettling experience: visually compelling, and aurally challenging. It demonstrates the fragility of any documentation, any archive, and of life itself.” AA -
Conflux Coldwell - Music for Installation
CONFLUX COLDWELL, 2023
Collection of music and sound works created for installation pieces.
"Dismantle the Sun... is clammy and crumbling like old concrete. Rather than just sound recordings of these events, Coldwell somehow captures tangible residues of them, like a projector slide shining light through grit and grime and dust" The Wire -
Conflux Coldwell - The Phantomatic Coast
SUBEXOTIC RECORDS, 2022
OST for Views from Sunk Island, released on vinyl and digital.
”Views from Sunk Island” captures a fading coastline with the click of a slide projector. While elsewhere field recordings of waves foghorns and the shriek of seabirds make this hauntological seaside excursion captivatingly moody" Electronic Sound Magazine -
Conflux Coldwell - Virtual Private Broadcast
CONFLUX COLDWELL, 2020
Album exploring the spectrality of webcams during the pandemic
”Coldwell goes beyond the dominant perception of hauntology to expose subtle layers below.” Wire Magazine -
CC - Zoetrope
CROOKED ACRES RECORDS, 2019
Part of AV project Zoetrope.space
"These tracks have an incantatory feel, as though Coldwell is using these old technologies to conjure something directly from the ether. While others working in Hauntology stand outside trying to draw the haunted house, Conflux Coldwell is inside carrying out an excorcism." Electronic Sound
-
CC - AM
CROOKED ACRES RECORDS, 2017
"It's everything hauntology could and should be in 2017" The WireTop Ten Experimental 2017, A Closer Listen
"More than a eulogy for a dying medium it is a fascinating aural meditation on the paradox of progress" Joseph Sannicandro, A Closer Listen