Curious Spectacles

I'm Matt Bennett. I teach film and media production at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash, and I write about what images do to us and how we make them.

This blog began in 2014 as a place to read film and television through psychoanalysis: the uncanny, desire, grief, the ghost story. Those posts are still here, and that question hasn't gone away. It has picked up a second one. I'm on research leave this semester, building a course on generative AI in creative work, asking media practitioners in India and at home how AI is changing production, and building AI systems that model Freud's account of the mind. I'm sharing that work here as it happens, including the parts that don't work.

The name has three meanings. A spectacle is something arresting to look at. Spectacles are the lenses you look through. A spec is the plan for building something. This blog is about all three.