My name is Mick. I like making strange things. I’m a professional jack-of-all-trades and digital creative. 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 different kinds of recordings play in our perception of time passing.

My work is deliberately multi-modal, from landscape photography and field recording to experimental film and new media innovations. 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 and forgotten parts of cities, industrial, abandoned and liminal spaces. Places in transition. My work often interrogates the weird 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’m into salvagepunk. 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.

Research Profile (University of Leeds)

ORCID