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Christopher Hales

Dr. Christopher Hales: Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Film at SMARTlab, Chris specialises in exploring the ‘interactive moving image’, as practitioner, educator and researcher. He taught in higher education for many years in the crossover of art and design with computers, and studied MA Interactive Multimedia at the Royal College of Art, London. His PhD ‘Rethinking the Interactive Movie’, which was successfully completed in October 2006, drew its conclusions from a study of audience response to a body of interactive movies created during 1995 – 2005, and presented a novel concept of ‘movie as interface’.

Chris’s films have been exhibited widely both as cdroms (displayed at numerous film/multimedia festivals) and combined together on a free-standing touch-screen installation. Amongst other venues the latter has been presented in Seoul, Helsinki, Warsaw, Nagoya, San Francisco and Sydney, and was included in the landmark 2003 ‘Future Cinema’ exhibition curated by the ZKM.

Chris writes frequently about ‘interactive moving image’, is a regular speaker at international events, and has created and delivered over 90 short workshop courses (of one to two weeks duration) on this subject in numerous institutions in Europe. Recent projects include 'Cause and Effect', an experimental interactive cinema performance which has been staged with Finnish colleagues in more than thirty international venues (www.causeandeffect.tk), and an AHRB-funded research project in Prague to rediscover the "Kinoautomat" from 1967 - the world's first interactive movie (www.kinoautomat.org).

Publication Update (December 2007)

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