Shimmer Teaser Clip

Shimmer is an experimental machinima film artwork that combines photographic assemblage, archival film, and video game imagery, commissioned by the Burton Art Gallery and Museum in 2024. It explores the vitality of materials, pollution, and climate change, blurring the distinction between animate and seemingly lifeless matter.

The film starts with scenes of a virtual planet in an elliptical shape, where we see a pair of flying spaceships over a strange ocean. This is followed by an inverted moving image of the River Torridge juxtaposed with Night City’s river bank (Cyberpunk 2077). Combined with real and virtual imagery and spoken words from two public informational films from the 1940s and 1980s, the film takes you into a river and estuary to physically and metaphorically see-through plastic. It uses visual and metaphorical ellipses to condense time, challenging conventional narratives about plastic waste and climate change. The film emphasises the scale of these global issues, extending beyond local perspectives.

The intent of the film isn't to provide a cohesive narrative but rather to highlight instability, self-reflection, and poetic mirroring. It encourages viewers to interpret climate change, reality, and virtual space personally. The film concludes by directing our gaze towards a bright virtual and real sun viewed through a petroleum-based plastic tube, framed through an imperfect ellipse. This alludes to Johannes Kepler's description of elliptical planetary orbits and to "liquid sunlight," reminding us that oil and petroleum are derived from organic materials—ancient plants and algae that captured sunlight through photosynthesis millions of years ago.