Lunchtime Seminar- Paul Laidler- To Live Is to Be Haunted

In this talk Paul shares an ongoing visual series titled To Live Is to Be Haunted, after Philip K. Dick – a practice-related project that treats generative A.I. as a slightly uncanny, print-adjacent apparatus: a system that repeats, slips, and misremembers. Here, authorship becomes less about invention and more about discovery through derivation. I use repetition, slippage, and re-enactment as methods—treating the machine as a reflective partner while keeping uncertainty visible as part of the work. Following printmaking’s logics of trace, derivation, and re-visitation, I ask what creative agency looks like when images circulate as unstable versions rather than fixed originals. Paul Laidler is a Senior Lecturer in BA Illustration and an associate member of CFPR at UWE Bristol. His research and practice explore how technologically informed culture—its speeds, interfaces, and habits of replication—quietly reshapes how images are made, read, and valued. With a background in collaborative print studio production and doctoral research into digitally mediated print and the artist–printer relationship, he works across art and design practices to examine trace, derivation, and authorship under changing technical conditions. Paul's Instagram-   / paul.laidler   CFPR instagram-   / cfpr_research   CFPR website- https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/