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Jon Dempsey

Senior Lecturer

School of Arts

Jon Dempsey
Role
Research
Professional information
Further details
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Role

Jon Dempsey is a Senior Lecturer and freelance film professional, specializing in artificial intelligence in the creative industries and in particular how it can be used in virtual cinematography, cinematic virtual reality and immersive storytelling.

An award winning film maker and member of the Horror Writers Guild he is particularily interested in redefining the axiom of story and the interaction between artificial intelligence, audience and storyteller in VR, AR and XR film making.

Areas of expertise

  • Artifical Intelligence in the Creative Industries
  • Cinematography (Digital and Film)
  • Image Technology
  • Virtual and Augmented Reality
  • Post Production, CGI and Motion Capture
  • Practical Special Effects (Blowing things up)

Teaching and supervision

Supervision

Recent examples of postgraduate supervision include.

  • Life and Death on Film: The Cinematic Expression of Childhood Trauma.
  • Personal and Political Filmmaking: The Use of Video Diaries to Confront the Uncomfortable Truth.
  • The Use of 360 Degree Filming in Documentary: Unedited Life in a Syrian Refugee Camp.

Research

His particular area of research interest is in Artifical Intelligence and how it interacts with the Uncanny and the Fantastique within visual storytelling; in particular within augmented and virtual reality.
 

CURRENT RESEARCH

Haunted Spectatorship: When the Image Looks Back

Put on a VR headset and something strange happens. You're not just watching - you're being watched.

This research proposes a Gothic framework for understanding Virtual Reality, arguing that the medium's real power isn't immersion but reciprocal haunting. VR's technical apparatus - sensory enclosure, processing lag, real-time tracking, algorithmic responsiveness, transforms spectators into something spectral. You become, in the research's central term, a data ghost: a perceptual presence both inhabiting and haunting the virtual scene.

Drawing on phenomenological encounters with four VR works - Miyubi, The Invisible Hours, Affected: The Manor, and Half-Life: Alyx - the research maps three distinct modes of Gothic spectatorship. The ontological ghost (The Invisible Hours) is invisible to characters yet logged by the system's analytics. The architecturally surveilled body (Affected: The Manor) moves through spaces that seem to watch back. The hapticly haunted participant (Half-Life: Alyx) holds their actual breath because a virtual creature might hear it.

Woven through these encounters are Merleau-Ponty's reversible perception, Lacan's theory of the gaze, and Derrida's hauntology - theoretical threads that reveal VR's strangeness as structural, not incidental.

The research also challenges the dominant "empathy machine" discourse. Gothic VR doesn't collapse the distance between self and other, it maintains that distance as an ethical relation, grounding responsibility in opacity and vulnerability rather than emotional identification.

In VR, to see is always already to be seen. The image looks back.
 

Research group membership

X10DD Senses Laboratory.

This is a research group that aims to nurture new cross-disciplinary research from:  Digital Media, Creative Coding, Fashion and Textile Design, Computer Games, Digital Film (and Screen Arts), Acting and Performance, Animation, Architecture, Visual Communication, and more -  into one dynamic research group, from inside and outside of the UK.
 

Previous Research projects

  • Immersive Storytelling, Ghosts and Confronting the Trauma of War: Life, Death, Reality and Virtual Unreality.
  • The Moment Between Seeing and Knowing: Creating Suspense, Fear and Suprise in Virtual Reality.
  • Seventy: Stories, Film, Identity, Heritage; Collecting Anglo Indian memories from those who lived through independence 70 years on.
  • Experience capturing and re-enactment for knowledge intensive training systems with wearable technologies and augmented reality.

Professional information

Memberships of professional bodies

  • AVID Certified Professional and AVID Certified Professional Instructor (ACI)
  • Horror Writers Guild

Further details

Other experience

Jon Dempsey has spent many years working as a film and television professional, originally a 35mm film cinematographer and then moving first into visual effects cinematography and more recently technical direction for visual effects. He has worked for broadcast TV, feature films, music videos and computer games.

Alongside his academic work, he still acts as a consultant for the industry in the area of visual effects cinematography and since 2014 has been an Avid Certified Instructor to professional level running industry training courses for professional film and TV editors in the Avid Media Composer software.

Further information

  1. Cannes Film Festival, Official Competition (Palme D’or nominee, Winner of JuryPrize) - FRANCE
  2. Brooklyn Film Festival - NEW YORK, USA
  3. CFC Toronto Worldwide Shorts Film Festival - CANADA
  4. Edinburgh International Film Festival, (Winner of Best British Short Film) - UK
  5. Expresion en Corto International Film Festival, Mexico - MEXICO
  6. Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival - BRAZIL
  7. Tinklai Film Festival, Lithuania
  8. Athens International Film Festival - GREECE
  9. Calgary International Film Festival - CANADA
  10. Warsaw International Film Festival - POLAND
  11. Cinessonne, European Film Festival, France - FRANCE
  12. Curto Circuito, Santiago de Compostela - SPAIN
  13. Ismaila Film Festival, Egypt - EGYPT
  14. Imagine Science, NYC, USA
  15. London Film Festival - UK- (People Are Strange at the NFT)
  16. St John's International Film Festival - CANADA
  17. Alcine, Madrid - SPAIN
  18. Rehoboth Festival - USA
  19. Stockholm International Film Festival - SWEDEN
  20. Bristol Brief Encounters - UK
  21. Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival- TAIWAN