I’m Only Human

We’re pleased to announce what we’ll be doing over the next few months – with support from Arts Council England’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund.

Accelerate Sessions

A short series of online conversations between artist animators, running across Summer/Autumn 2020. We’re working in partnership with some great  independent organisations and curators as guest programmers: Edwin Rostron (Edge of Frame), and Alys Scott Hawkins and Ellie Land (Animated Documentary)

The series started with Female Figures, on 2 July 2020, with Animate’s Abigail Addison and artists Jessica Ashman, Anna Bunting-Branch, Birgitta Hosea and Michelle Kranot. In association with London International Film Festival. You can see a recording of the session here.

I’m Only Human commissions

We’ve commissioned three new works for digital platforms, in the context of, but not about, COVID-19 that explore ideas of what it means to be human and how we inhabit our bodies. Films by artists Sebastian Buerkner, Kim Noce, and Daksha Patel will be online in autumn 2020.

Before lockdown we were developing a new, longer-term programme that would take a critically engaged approach to developing artists’ animation work in VR, supporting artists to develop their skills to make and exhibit VR/immersive work. The possibility of a VR project – with its physical intimacy, and budgets – seems a way off now, but we still want to start talking about this..

We held our first Digital Summat in the real world, at QUAD, Derby, alongside our Parts & Labour OPEN exhibition, in 2016. Digital Summat II will be an online event looking at the potential of VR and other  technologies for artist animators, and innovative approaches to exhibition and public engagement.

We’re excited to be working with QUAD, Derby and Phoenix, Leicester on the I’m Only Human commissions and Digital Summat II.

WORK Records

Our WORK commissions – artists’ films about contemporary work, made with workers – by Dryden Goodwin, Jenny Holt, Esther Johnson, and Adam Lewis Jacob, launched online on 1 May, and you can see them here. Continuing this exploration of work and workers’ lives, we’ll be developing a community based, participant and artist led exploration of historical working lives, working with historic collections and archives.

Image: Kim Noce, Self-portrait working in studio during COVID 19 lockdown