Tell us about your relevant experience. Please include details of previous screenings, events and/or exhibitions. (500)
For a number of years I’ve exhibited and performed either on my own or as part of a collaboration with the art collective AAS. I have broad practice across sculpture, performance, film, painting, music, and publishing. A constant thread in this work has been engagement with the form, codes, politics, and culture of cinema, television, and video games.
As part of AAS I produced a number of projects that either incorporated or were fully realised as moving image works. Of particular note was 2015’s “Young Castle for The Elder Sun”, a four hour multicamera internet television show filmed Newcastle and broadcast live over Twitch to Flux Factory in New York. In 2016 AAS produced a number of works that combined performance with prerecorded and live video using a range of image sources, outputs, and means of editing and manipulating them in real time. This culminated in my final project with the collective, “Chaotic Good” in 2016, a performance primarily experienced through “the monolith”, a repurposed server tower with embedded screen, that allowed the audience to manually choose between the 16 tracks of live and prerecorded audio and video using a patch bay, the resulting edit being broadcast over the internet and formed the final document of the project.
In 2016 I left AAS to pursue a PhD exploring art practice through videogames and horror cinema. I see my work as an artist and researcher as two paths through the same field, something most apparent at the overlaps between academic presentations at research conferences and art performances, both incorporating a live presentation alongside a projected screen. Examples include “Creature of Havok” at SERF, Leeds, and “TFW: The Formless Wastes” at Res. London (both 2017) where a live performance incorporated front and rear projection video loops that were used as variables to dictate parts of the performance in the manner of a dice roll.
In 2018 I produced my first web specific artwork, entitled “The Inhuman Ecstasy of Toxic Waste” for WORMWORM.org. This took the form of layered and looped video built from scenes of “toxic waste” from late 70s to mid 90s tv and cinema, and a text on the same subject in the form of a script to be read aloud by the audience. In the same year I performed other works that incorporated interaction between live performance and moving image at contexts including Whitechapel Gallery, Art Licks Weekend, and Reading University. In 2018 I also produced a video entitled “TFW: The Formless Wastes 2” by screen capturing a playthrough of a videogame I had designed for this purpose. I also gave performance lectures on cinematic affect in horror films and videogames at a number of academic conferences including at London Southbank University, University of Hertfordshire, Edinburgh University, Northumbria University, Newcastle University, and Liverpool University.
Since the outbreak of Covid 19 I have produced online moving image based projects for Kim? Contemporary Art in Riga, FACT Liverpool, Wysing Arts Centre, Shape Arts, and Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Collabs
Penance Stare is an experimental metal band based in and around Newcastle Upon Tyne, established in 2017.
Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Esme Louise Newman has been active in music since the late 00’s, performing punk and noise rock with the bands Etai Keshiki and Commiserations, as well as electronic music as Melting, among several others.
In 2017, Newman began to self-record and release solo material under the Penance Stare name from her new home in the North East of England, eventually issuing an EP and two full-length albums. In contrast to the sounds of her former projects, this new project explored influences from black metal, shoegaze, darkwave and doom metal.
In 2019, drummer Sklyar Gill, formerly of doom metal band Proboscis, was recruited, and work began on a third album as a duo, as well as several live shows and a short tour.
The project has received positive attention from press outlets such as Wire, The Quietus and Noisey, and have shared stages with like-minded acts including Big Brave, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Bong and Plague Rider.
Outside of the band, the duo maintain multiple additional projects, Gill is a vocalist in the ambient drone band Möbius, plays drums in Black Holes Are Cannibals, and has appeared on several Lovely Wife recordings. Newman produces noise and dark ambient music as 1727 and black metal as Petrine Cross.
Penance Stare are -
Esme Louise Newman - vocals, guitar, synthesiser, electronics
Skylar Gill - drum kit
Leyya Mona Tawil [Lime Rickey International] is an artist working with sound, performance, and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her 24-year record of performance/installation scores that have been presented in cities throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil was the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow and a 2018 Saari Residence Fellow (Finland). Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith (2019) was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. Tawil has received commissions from Abrons Arts Center (NYC), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), Pieter Performance Space (Los Angeles), Gibney DiP (NYC) and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (Oakland). She is the founder and director of Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental live art and music from the SWANA diaspora.
Tawil uses voice, microphones, interactive surfaces and electronics to build hybrid performances and sound compositions. Her work slips between codes of fiction, concept and embodied action in a manner that challenges cultural legibility. In her “diasporic imaginary,” she digs into how specific reference points collide and transmit nomadic knowledge through sound signaling and distortions of visual, physical and digital form. These ideas, relayed through voice, body and object, are meant to cue new ways of listening and future building.
WHY SIGNIFICANT TO DEVELOPMENT (150)
Changes to the world around as well as my own health in 2020 have meant my practice has shifted to an almost entirely digital one. Last year I completed my first full video game Animal Agency (which involved a collaboration with the band Penance Stare), and this year I have both produced browser based games and worked with a professional production team to make an artwork in Augmented Reality (AR). All of these projects have seen increased opportunity to explore audio and animation. Alongside this shift I have been researching the relationship between AR and early both 2.5d game environments and earlier rotoscoping technology, producing gifs as sketches toward a larger animation project.
The opportunity provided by Image Behavior comes at a very fortuitous time, to build on these combined experiences, research, and experiments, to produce a complete animation, with voice acting in collaboration with performers and musicians.
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Gloomland (working title)
Gloomland is an animated science fiction artist’s film set in a village on a future headland where beings and systems arise from the collapse of old ecologies and industry. Huge mining robots repurposed by joyous gangs of monstrous children dance to draw worms out of the earth. Rotten downed satellites leak a crystalline wax that is traded in a complicated socio-political game. A general strike of chemical producing organisms is led by a charismatic bird.
Gloomland is presented as the field interviews, found documents, and other forms of research compiled by an agent documenting this interconnected society and landscape. It explores a world, the agent’s developing attempts to account for what she experiences, and the folding of these experiences into the community itself.
Gloomland is part of my ongoing research into how the horror genre’s core of suspicion might be rearticulated as love and care. Gloomland is built in part from two recurring motifs in horror and science fiction:
1: The epistolary form, where narrative is presented through documents, runs at least as far back in the history of horror as Dracula, while being seen more recently in mondo and found footage cinema of the last 60 years. [It’s mirror is perhaps the love letter]
2: The related figure of the agent/investigator sent to a rural environment only to struggle to keep a distance between themselves and the object of examination. [In horror we see this in The Wickerman, The Wailing, and Twin Peaks, but equally in Local Hero and Sans Soleil]
On its surface, Gloomland is an animated film, taking the form of a far future agent’s reports, found documents, interviews, field recordings, and increasingly; interpretations and creative responses to a remote, post-collapse environment. Our agent recounts her meeting with sentient A.I.s inhabiting beached fishing vessels. She talks us through her map of subterranean tunnels where complex multi species burial rituals take place. She shows us things she has found but does not attempt to name.
Gloomland seeks to critique the racist colonial structure that runs through the aforementioned horror/science fiction motifs through our agents' approach to archiving and engaging with the individuals, collectives, features, and tendencies she encounters.
Our agent finds that she must adapt her process, it becomes increasingly creative, affective, and open. She refuses any claim of objective observation and instead creates her own fiction. She sings songs, makes sound collages, and writes her own stories to articulate things beyond any direct comprehension.
Over its duration, the narrative increasingly emphasizes environmental storytelling, unreliable narration, and world building that encourages an audience’s active speculation rather than fixed resolution.
Gloomland is about a person falling in love with a whole ecosystem and trying to articulate their euphoria at this experience.
Working with highly creative musicians and performers allows this project to centre audio and speech as much as imagery. Gloomland is articulated through its sound design and music, and through the agent’s voice and the songs she sings.
Tech requirments
Gloomland has been developed with an online streaming environment in mind, but it would be possible to be adapted for show in a cinema should this be required. The intended tone and visual language is aimed at the audience watching via a web browser. In large part this is about accessibility (I personally would not be able to travel to the ICA for screening), but it's also a context that fits the how Gloomland references archival footage and videogame streams. With a simple web hosting platform I would also like to use a description text to embedded further documents that expand the world, such as maps, schematics, timelines etc.
Gloomland is produced primarily using digital animation, principally in Synfig and editing in Premiere. Audio is recorded in home studios in Newcastle and Oakland (to allow for Covid19 restrictions).
Please describe how your proposal could be developed further with a production grant of £30,000 in 500 words or less.
Gloomland is a complete project of around 10 minutes duration with the majority of work produced by myself, but I see it also as a proof of concept towards something larger with more sophisticated production.
The opportunity to expand this budget, this would allow me first of all employ additional animators (the largest resource cost of a project like this). This would open the possibility of longer duration, but also different kinds of animation.
I’ve worked with stop frame animation using DragonFrame setups before and I would very much like to incorporate this into Gloomland, not least because it would mean I could work with the visual language isometric RPG videogames such as Fallout and Planetscape. With the project’s original budget I have focused on working with processes I can do entirely at home, with the expanded budget I would be able to rent a studio, produce clay models and work with professionals who have skills and hardware to produce non-digital animation. I would also then have the time and space to explore more animation using hand drawn elements which are then scanned and rigged (I experimented with this in my game Animal Agency, and its effects are fantastic, but it is too time consuming to employ in the standard budget).
Additional resources to production would mean more possibility for experimentation. The disorientating greenscreen work of early FMV games such as Myst has long been an aesthetic I’ve found exciting, but it needs more resources in terms of time and space than I have so it is not something I have been able to work with so far. Furthermore, while I am a competent video editor, an expanded budget would allow this role to be taken over by a professional.
The expanded budget would mean I could experiment with such processes and take further risks, working with outside practitioners with more experience and knowledge than I have.
Most importantly, an expanded budget, which allows for employing additional animators, would allow this project to expand its audio component, and give it more space for experimentation. This is an area I am particularly excited about with Gloomland. For the standard budget I have talked with musicians and planned the audio based around an economical use of time. I am commissioning sound design and ambient music elements which I can then edit myself, and the dialogue is based around a single voice actor, and what they can comfortably record in two days. With the expanded budget I would be able to develop this area significantly, allowing a complete score, more integrated sound design, additional musicians and additional voice acting.
Supporting Images: https://umabreakdown.neocities.org/research/IC1.html
