My short film titled nou (18 minutes, 2018) is part of an art practice which uses established methodologies of appropriation, the cut-up and collage in order to speculate new worlds and new beings.
When I was a child, I was hypnotised by my dentist. Using a narrative involving rabbits being chased by a fox as an induction to hypnosis, my dentist gave me a filling, without anaesthetic. The event was filmed by the BBC and broadcast on television in the UK as part of the documentary Hypnosis and Healing (1982). Much of my art practice uses this piece of television footage as a tool of change and as an opportunity to discuss resonances and readings of existing cultural objects such as films, books and biographies.

A response to Naomi Mitchison’s feminist science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), nou is a tale of space travel, hypnosis and transformation in which the protagonist nou leaves her home planet, travels through a kaleidoscopic tunnel only to emerge in the tooth of a child who has been hypnotised by her dentist. The film performs the well-known science fiction trope of alien invasion, reframing it from a feminist perspective in order to foreground the fluid nature of identity.

In nou, the BBC archive footage of childhood hypnosis is the setting for a narrative that merges bodies and creates hybridization, rendering distinctions between the artist, the hypnotized child and the alien ‘nou’, fuzzy. In nou, the television archive changes the future by mutating the artist from a human to an alien/human hybrid while reclaiming her broadcast image. This presentation will discuss how this new hybrid being might be used as a device to drive future fictions in which she imagines her way out of the contemporary ideological framework from which she emerged.

I gave the paper Who’s nou? How one story used television to summon a non-human fiction-self device for the author at this conference organised by London Arts-Based Research Centre at Oxford University, 24-26 May 2025. This conference convened screenwriters, performance storytellers, digital storytellers, authors, educators, practitioners, journalists, scholars, researchers, psychologists, visual artists, and other creatives to explore the diverse types, functions, and significance of storytelling. In addition to delving into the fundamental question, “what truly constitutes a story?”, we seek to delve into why storytelling remains vital, how it continues to resonate in contemporary society, and the profound impact narratives have on shaping our perceptions and identities. With a comparative lens, we will examine various narrative forms, tracing their roots in mythology to the latest innovations in storytelling.

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