🕸

Literature review framework

This research examines how fine artists use cinematic genre tropes and visual motifs in moving image work and photography, how authorship is conceptualised when working with techniques including appropriation and pastiche, and how working with AI-generated content complicates these issues further.

While the deliberate appropriation of existing images, styles, or motifs from other works and cultural sources is a well documented creative method, this approach appears to be an increasing aspect of works which use prompt based and generative ai systems as a tool. Rather than a deliberate critique or contextualisation of the original materials, AI image tools often recreate the visual style of individuals and movements, potentially without the intention, or the understanding of the artist making a new work.  In the context of a technologically engaged visual practice, I’m interested in how artists approach copying, pastiche, homage, remix, appropriation, ripping, quotation and recontextualisation, and where the differences between these practices lie.

The following is a preliminary outline of topics for a literature review. Some sections are less robust than others, and should be refined over time.

Appropriation, copying and complicating authorship

This section works to define what I mean by appropriation in this context, acknowledging that anxiety about the individual artist and machinic reproduction is not new, and grounding appropriation as a method.

If we compare the intentional process of appropriation as a method to the modelling of a style via a model, are the critical possibilities of appropriation as an artistic method still present if the culture being pastiched is not visible?

  • Appropriation as a way of understanding how ownership, authorship and value is constructed
  • Meme and remix as a way democratise culture
  • Recontextualisation (detournement) as a method to create new meaning
  • Power and credit discrepancies
  • Flatting context and meaning
  • Legal and economic harm to artists
  • Opportunism without criticality
  • Does it matter who is being appropriated (artist, corporation, anonymous author, marginalised community) and the intent of the appropriation.
  • What is the difference between appropriation of the image itself, and the appropriation of a style or vibe?

Reading

  • Louis Aragon The Challenge to Painting (excepts in Surrealists on Art, Lucy R Lippard)
  • Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (2011)
  • Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985)
  • Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982/1997)
  • Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (1967)
  • Michel Foucault, What is an Author? (1969)
  • Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) — chapter on pastiche
  • Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
  • Douglas Crimp, Pictures 1979 (Pictures generation)
  • Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (2003)
  • Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” (1980)
  • Hito Steyerl, In defence of the poor image, the wretched of the screen
  • Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet” (2010)
  • Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020)
  • The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (2018)
  • Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2014)
  • Appropriation, Whitechapel gallery documents of contemporary art
  • Surrealists on Art, Lucy R Lippard 1970
  • The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies 2025

Ai and appropriation

  • AI art and Artists: What they are, what they could be, what they should me, Dominic McIver Lopes
  • 3 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music by Jennifer Walshe
  • Unstable images: generative AI and the Liminal politics of seeing, David F van der Merwe (2025)
  • Boris Groys From Writing to Prompting: AI as Zeitgeist-Machine 2023

Copywrite

  • The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies 2025
  • DANCING SOMEONE ELSE’S MOVEMENTS THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY: THE PROCESS OF COMMODIFICATION OF THE DIGITAL DANCING BODY AND THE ARISING TENSIONS WITH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIMES, 2021
  • Gov.UK report on copywrite and artificial intelligence 2024-26

Genre, cinematic genre

Artists have recontextualised images and media from a variety of industries including film, tv, advertising and in order frame my reading in a managable way, I will be considering how artists have used motifs and tropes from cinema specifically. To be able to understand what I mean by appropriating elements of genre, I need to first understand what genre is in cinema, how it is constructed and how it is used.

Key questions are:

  • What is genre
  • How is genre used
  • Who defines genre and why

I’m considering whether I need to also include a section on how artists have used cinema in their practices, but this may be expansive.

Reading

  • Tropes in films, an initial analysis, Garcia Ortega, 2021
  • Film/Genre, Rick Altman, 1998
  • A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre, Rick Altman 1984
  • Cinematic Intermediality Theory and Practice Edited by Kim Knowles and Marion Schmid 2021
  • The digital secret of the moving image, 2014
  • Hollywoord genres Thomas Schatz 1991
  • A computational lens into how music characterizes genre in film, Ma 2021
  • The Epistemology of Cindy Sherman: A Research Method for Media and Cultural Studies Author(s): BARRY J. MAUER
  • Post-Carroll Functional Elements of the Moving Image, Philip Cowan 2020
  • Post-, grand, classical or so called, what is and was film theory, Casetti, 2018
  • A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory, Mittell 2001
  • Questions of genre, Steve Neal 1990

Film and contemporary art

  • Theorising Film through Contemporary Art, Expanding Cinema Murphy 2011
  • A HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 1999

Gothic horror

I have chosen gothic horror as the genre as the primary genre for investigation. ‘Gothic’ as a set of conditions can be applied to music, fashion, literature, games, films and subculture, with can contain further subgenres depending on the area like cyber goth fashion, new and neo gothic art, gothic romance literature. Gothic horror in itself is amorphous and cycles into popular culture often (see 2026’s The Bride!, MĀRAMA, 2025’s Frankenstein, Dracula A loves tale, Sinners (southern gothic), 2024’s Nosferatu).

Introducing this genre as a focus relates to my practice and personal interested in looking at gothic/horror and genre fiction/ing, and its use as a precursor to science fiction, speculative fiction, and its use as reactive (potentially reactionary) media .

Here I hope to introduce the definitions of gothic horror historically, contemporarily, in cinema and in art, noting that these areas bleed into one another constantly.

What’s the difference between gothic horror and horror for goths?

Reading

  • The supernatural media virus, virus anxiety in Gothic Fiction since 1990
  • The Horror Show! Exhibition book Somerset house 2022
  • Horror: A Literary History, Xavier Aldana Reyes
  • Contemporary Gothic_ by Catherine Spooner
  • The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
  • Gothic Modern: From Edvard Munch to Käthe Kollwitz edited by Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff and Juliet Simpson
  • Reading the Gothic Series (Manchester University Press)
  • Fashioning gothic bodies Catherine Spooner
  • The grotesque, Justin D Edwards
  • Hellbound, Francesca Gavin
  • The Gothic Whitechapel documents, Gilda Williams
  • Post-horror: art genre and cultural elevation, David Church
  • Making monsters: Gothic Processes and Metaphors in Contemporary Art Lecture Gilda Williams 28 Oct 2009, Notes from the lecture
  • Gothic v Gothick Gilda Williams Art Monthly 2009
  • The Ghost in the Image: Technology and Reality in the Horror Genre by Cecilia SayadGenre by Cecilia Sayad 2023
  • Power of Horror, Kristeva 1980
  • https://electricliterature.com/carmen-maria-machado-carmilla-lefanu-vampire-interview/ Find Carmen Maria Machados intro to Carmella
  • Carrier bag of fiction

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/blog/2026/06/17/gothic-studies-reading-list-2026/

Magpie practice

This section is none descript at the moment and relates more to my personal practice of genre skipping/emulating. I’m not sure how to represent this at the moment.

Dissemination of fan works/fan culture

This may be out of scope potentially, but I am interested in fan culture, and how they fans react differently to AI generated media in comparison to fanfic. How fans influence genre and how genre can be used, and in general collective writing and dissemination practices. Self publishing practices, and dual publishing practices.

Reading

  • Zines and computational publishing practices, Kendal Baynon-
  • Online Academics: The Wiki TV Tropes as a Community of Pseudo-Academic Producers 2013
  • Jennifer M. Martin. Crowd-based Information Organization: A Case Study of the Folk Ontologies in Wikipedia and TV Tropes. A Master’s Paper for the M.S. in L.S degree. April, 2013. 68 pages. Advisor: Ryan Shaw
  • Examining Collaborative Fanfiction: New Practices in Hyperdiegesis and Poaching
  • Trope Propagation in the Cultural Space McLinn 2021
  • The heated rivalry fanfiction furore https://fanlore.org/wiki/Heated_Rivalry

Artists

A none exhaustive list of artists who’s practices I feel could be relevant:

  • Cindy Sherman, Untitled film stills

  • Jeff Wall, photography staged with lighting/blocking/narrative tension of a film still

  • Gregory Crewdson, staged scenes shot with full film crew

  • Alex Prager, saturated, 1950’s technicolor-era staged scenes

  • Philip-Lorca diCorcia

  • Tracey Moffatt, melodrama

  • Melanie Pullen, High fashion crime scenes

  • Larry Sultan

  • Rodney Graham

  • Chino Moya

  • Matthew Barney

  • Jenkin van Zyl

  • Pierre Huyghe (third memory)

  • Thomas Demand

  • John Baldessari

  • John Stezaker

  • Richard Prince

  • Alfiah Rahdini (Sailor Moon)

  • Yasumasa Morimura

  • Andy Warhol

  • Luc Tuymans

  • Peter Doig

  • Douglas Gordon

  • Christian Marclay

  • Hiroshi Sugimoto, Theatres (arguably)

  • Candice Breitz, Mother (2005)

  • Martin Arnold, Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998)

  • Telephones, 1995 - Christian Marclay

  • Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart (1936)

  • Bruce Conner. A MOVIE. 1958

  • Ming Wong

  • Omer Fast, Five Thousand Feet is the Best

  • Elisabeth Subrin — Shulie 1997

  • Deep ASCII Vuk Cosic

  • Zdzisław Beksiński always comes up when searching for artists who use horror, and gothic horror – particularly paintings but I think his computer graphics are more interesting/strange/kitsc

  • Matthew Barney

  • Mire Lee (ick)

  • Lee Bul (cybernetic augmentation)

  • ORLAN

  • LuYang

  • Work from the David Cronenberg: Transformation exhibition TIFF

  • Candice Breitz Treatment 2013

  • Sanatorium James Coupe 2013

  • To the Boy Who Leaves His Heart in a Secret Place (2013) by Marcel Dzama

  • Introduction to Quaternary Degranulation (2013) by Jeremy Shaw

  • Thy Neighbour’s Wife (2013) by Jamie Shovlin

  • Andrzej Zuławski

  • Coralie Fargeat

  • Heads For Business And Bodies For Sin Maria Guta and Lauren Huret

  • Jelena’s magic mountain project

Film

The Love Witch 2016 Darth Merengie’s Dark Place In Fabric 2018 Berberian Sound Studio 2012 Peter Strickland (Amer 2009, the house of the devil 2009, starry eyes 2014)