Haunting the Corporate World: Using experimental moving image to disrupt corporate digital content and defamiliarise corporate culture

This thesis is a practice-as-research project exploring an innovative method of using experimental moving image to interrogate corporate digital content and corporate culture. Consisting of seven videos ranging from around 2 minutes to 11 minutes in length, and a written component, this research critically examines corporate videos, podcasts, social media platforms and websites. I use these sources to re-stage, satirise, and critique the corporate world through filmic ‘echo-reflections’ created using experimental moving image. I develop the technique of ‘self-multiplication’, where I am both filmmaker and performer in the work, using green-screen technology to multiply myself to perform a cast of corporate characters who are superimposed within landscapes created through digital compositing. I use the techniques of self-multiplication and ‘effacement’ to create nightmarish caricatures of the corporate workplace, subverting the hegemonic structure of the ‘self as entrepreneur’ through depictions of the self as a splintered, unknowable, and strange entity. Drawing on a lineage of experimental film practices (in particular the work of Maya Deren, Hito Steyerl and Rachel Maclean) and engaging with a range of theoretical sources across cultural studies, political sciences, anthropology, philosophy and economics, this research investigates ways to highlight and disrupt the presence of corporate neoliberal structures using experimental practice.

In this project I use experimental techniques to interrogate the ‘corporate video’, intervening in the way contemporary corporations use video as a vehicle for company ethos and identity, as well as a tool of persuasion and manipulation. The techniques developed in this research contribute new knowledge to the field of experimental film and video, offering a novel method of using experimental practice to interrogate corporate digital content and corporate culture. I use moving image to make audio-visual echo-reflections of the corporate world, providing space for critique by making the corporate world appear strange and unfamiliar. My film work gives tangibility to the elusive presence of neoliberal ideology by examining specific examples of corporate digital content, and by focusing on the language and practices of the management consulting industry. I use video to re-stage specific forms of marketing, PR, and managerial culture in a way that defamiliarises the corporate world, whilst also making it more tangible and thus open to critique. I call the production process I develop in this research ‘hauntological montage’, which describes both the uncanny effect of self-multiplication and an aesthetic producing a heightened sense of digital materiality.