Exploring Senses artists are collaborating with youth artists to create artwork, music and lyrics, which will be made into a film by Nathan Clear, providing an alternative viewpoint on young people’s challenges in daily life.

The short film will be projected onto the side of the old Lloyds Bank on Broadway in Crawley.

Thanks to Crawley Community Youth Service and Brighton Youth Centre for their support.

Please Note: Oska Bright Film Festival x Dreamy Place Outdoor Film Trail that takes place at the same time in Crawley on 12th October will include this short film on its one hour trail.

A collection of films by Chinese artists, curated by Hangzhou’s artists’ agency Martin Goya Business. Showing as a group exhibition at Lighthouse, films by artists CHILLCHILL, GUAN, LazyBackHome, Uan and Zhu Jinkun will surprise, challenge and consume viewers.

About the artists in the exhibition

CHILLCHILL is an artist whose art practice revolves around urban life, third world and subculture. He uses his unique sense of humour to mix the virtual world and the real world he lives in. He mentions his work as a “stand-up show about realism”. He works on 3D rendered moving images and live performances with real- time rendering by game engines.

GUAN (Guan Boyang) is an electronic music producer and digital media artist from Hangzhou. He is currently signed under the Modern Sky label and has established himself firmly in the Chinese music scene with his unique digital dystopian aesthetics. Graduating from the China Academy of Art, he has developed his own distinctive approach to sound and other mediums, critically examining the relationship between humans and technology in digital society.

GUAN’s work is characterised by its eccentricity and is known for its fusion and versatility in musical genres. Through his imaginative exploration of future mutant organisms, he has created a “high-tech naturalism” sound system, where radical sonic experiments shape bizarre and organic landscapes.

LazyBackHome attempts to deconstruct these observations and visually represent the fragmented nature of the information era through collage. Her work delves into the triangular relationship among media, authority, and individuals, deeply embedded in the context of the internet society.
She has shown work at The Wrong Digital Art Biennale, Florence Biennale, OTA FINE ART Gallery, Ars Electronica’s “Yami-Ichi,” and Venice Biennale. In 2023, she conducted a residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Art Center in Shanghai.

Uan is an independent artist, mainly using installation, moving images and performance as creative media, engaged in art and fashion for about 10 years, and now lives in Shanghai. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins Womenswear, She worked as an art director for various media and brands, stages and videos, T Magazine, VOGUE, Bazaar fashion, Instyle, GQ etc. Meanwhile, she is active as a visual artist, installation maker and performer in art exhibitions, club culture, fashion shows and other multi-dimensional stages.

Uan’s works are characterised by a kind of role-playing/magical/occult/virtual idol/eroticism/cyborg, exploring the Intersections of Audio-Visual, Performance, and Installation Art, refer to investigate the intersections of these forms of art, with a focus on how they can be combined to create innovative and immersive art experiences. to stimulate hyper-real sensory trips.

Zhu Jinkun focuses on the complex network society, reveals the halo under the authority of media and technology, and responds to or subverts reality with the weirdness in it. In the context of the global Internet, the boundaries of identity, community, and culture have melted and broken, and the contradictions and conflicts born when this knot was opened are staged in turn between reality and fiction.

His works have been exhibited at 660 Madison Avenue, COMA Gallery, Venice Armory, Zhejiang Art Museum, MARTIN GOYA BUSINESS, chi K11 Art Center (Hong Kong), TANK ART Shanghai, West Bund Art Museum (Shanghai), Liu Haisu Art Museum, CEF Experimental Image Center.

Exploring Senses artists are collaborating with youth artists to create, artwork, music, lyrics which will be made into a film by Nathan Clear, providing an alternative viewpoint on young people’s challenges in daily life.

The short film will be projected onto the side of TK Maxx in Brighton on North Street.

Thanks to Crawley Community Youth Service and Brighton Youth Centre for their support.

• TR333 by April Lin 林森, 2021, 10 mins
• Where’s My Stick? by Clifford Sage, 2019, 4:20 mins
• Icarus by Jessy Jetpacks, 2020, 3:57 mins
• The Air in Cyberspace by Megan Watson, 2022, 3:20 mins
• Queer Theory Saved My Life by P1nk Poodle, 2023, 4:23 mins

This event is free to attend, and is being shown throughout the duration of our Pop Up Arcade exhibition.

Don’t miss out on this captivating journey into the world of videogame-inspired films!

Film details and Artist Bios

TR333, April Lin 林森, 2021, 10 mins
In collaboration with ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, artist-filmmaker April Lin 林森 presents ‘TR333’, a speculative documentary which imagines a new species of tree based on scientific literature on plants and climate hardiness. Their hybrid forms and body parts a patchwork amalgamation of different tree types, this tree is a climate adaptative response, a lifeform born out of resilience and hope. As the spirit inhabiting the tree emerges to converse with the viewer, they share with us their experiences of ecocidal generational trauma, urging us to reflect around the ways all the beings on the planet are deeply interlinked, and to honour our collective responsibility towards one another. Using a blend of 3D animation, found footage, and a musical score based on data sonification, ‘TR333’ uses the speculative to recast the ecological crisis, asking ‘Why is this important?’ from a multispecies and affective gaze.

Commissioned by Sheffield DocFest and supported by Wellcome.

April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery.

Interweaving strands of auto-biography, documentary, queer ecology, and new media, April Lin 林森’s works are topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters dialoguing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma.

Their work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Sheffield DocFest, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the V&A Museum, HOME, Malmö Konstmuseum, LA Filmforum, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Manchester Art Gallery, MADATAC, Arebyte Gallery, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, NOWNESS Asia, and 4:3 Boiler Room.

Where’s My Stick? Clifford Sage, 2019, 4:20 mins
When we see ProDance® in the Where’s My Stick video, we see him at a transmission system, an intergalactic signal post on a telecommunication exchange planet. He dials into planet Earth’s web, accessing their protocols and sends an upload request to Quantum Natives Records.

The recsund ProDance® is an Audio Visual Project combining many functionalities into one, it has been the visual basis of the Quantum Natives release Intellectual Reject series and acts as a moving image medium across live visuals, game play mechanics, story telling and Virtual Reality ventures.

Initially a light-hearted experiment, the ProDance® has grown respect in the art and music community, being show live at the ICA 2017 and at Drawing Room gallery London 2016 but also UK comedy network with Adult Swim UK re-releasing the Where’s My Stick Video.

The Project continues as part of recsund Quantum Natives releases and is currently building up to be a 3rd person adventure game, ‘ProDance® Music Academy’ where we get to explore the ProDance®’s exiled world and learn how to make music with him and to hopefully return to Earth.

Clifford Sage (Recsund) is a CGI artist, musician and UCL lecturer of 3D design from Somerset, England. Often working with virtual world-building and digital animation, Sage explores audio interaction and non-linear storytelling through game engine mechanics. Since graduating in Visual Communications from the Royal College of Art in 2010, Sage was a co-founder of Werkflow.ltd games studio. He has performed audiovisual sets at festivals including Rewire, L.E.V. and Atonal, collaborating with artists including Lee Gamble, Keiken and Lawrence Lek. Sammy Lee and Yuri Pattison. Recently he worked on Resident Advisor’s Club Quarantäne Series as part of the Off World.live. He has been making music under the recsund alias since 2001 and has released on Quantum Natives and Alien Jams.

Recent Personal projects include recsund – Tuner, exhibiting/performing at Somerset House Studios, London (2018) and Club Adriatico, Ravenna, IT (2018), LEV Festival, ES (2019). Vitalcapacities (2020) and ReWire Festival, NL (2021),Xolo, Space Generators(2021),London

Icarus, Jessy Jetpacks, 2020, 3:57 mins
Icarus is the second track from a six-track concept album called ‘Day of the Challenger’. Originally composed and shown as part of an immersive synchronised audiovisual and virtual reality installation, this circular film was projected into a circular shadow. An eclipse. The album loops at sunrise, the passage of the sun over a barren desert is a motif echoed in the virtual reality space.

Within the virtual reality of the original installation, the viewer is granted a growing flesh body that disintegrates into a stellar nursery. In this video, the singing character appears as three avatars traversing a barren desert, made partly of flesh. At one point a fourth wall is introduced and broken as the artist scribbles clumsily on the screen.

The visual signifiers tell a story of transcending the self and depersonalising the narrative, but the song lyrics speak of the price of ambition. The original story of Icarus is that he escaped his city prison on homemade wings. Then in his joy, he perished by flying too high as the wax holding the wings melted under an unforgiving sun. These days you don’t even need to fly to get burned.

Jessy Jetpacks is a London based multi-disciplinary artist. Her mediums include painting, sculpture, film, music, audio/video installations, and performance. Themes and interests range from the global political to the fundamental and private human condition – where advocacy, poetry, and philosophy become bedfellows.

The Air in Cyberspace, Megan Watson, 2022, 3:20 mins
The Air in Cyberspace is a Sci-Fi animation depicting cyberspace as a parallel universe. A datascape of information seeping from the physical world to a geographical, abstract ocean of electric bioluminescence. Inspired by cyberculture theories, The Air in Cyberspace depicts the start of self-organising cyborg existence.

Megan Eekie Watson is a visual artist from Teesside, currently based in Glasgow. Her work is deeply influenced by Queer Ecology and Cyberculture theories such as posthumanism, cyborg ontology, and glitch feminism. Through sci-fi themes, she seeks to challenge anthropocentrism and celebrate the commonalities that unite an ecology.

Queer Theory Saved My Life, P1nk Poodle, 2023, 4:23 mins
Queer Theory Saved My Life explores queerness in AI image models alongside NASA public domain footage. Typically text-to-image AI image generation is done with visually descriptive keywords, but by inputting excerpts from queer theorists unexpected representations are created. Various cycles of feedback into the image generators, alongside other processing are used in a science fiction narrative of escape to Mars.

P1nk Poodle is a non-binary artist and filmmaker, at once new-born as of 2020 and at the same time bringing over a decade’s experience in the film industry from a past existence. They work at the intersection of fiction and documentary/non-fiction, creating hybrid forms in mixed media, using moving image, digital art and 2D/3D animation.
As a queer, neurodivergent artist they foreground inclusive and collaborative approaches to creating work. Recent screenings include: videoclub / Videotage’s Both Sides Now, Fringe!, and Scottish Queer International Film Festival. In a filmmaker alter ego they’ve worked with Tate Modern, MoMA, Science Museum, and IWM Holocaust Galleries among others.