Film Work | Andy Hughes

Film title: Inner Migration (2024)
Runtime: 10 min

In the film Hughes’s avatar travels through the landscape, running across a trash mountain and swimming backwards into a sunset. We also see and hear archive material from "Out of This World" (1964) and "To New Horizons" (1940), two promotional American domestic films created by General Motors that present future worlds.In exploring this virtual world like a flâneur, the artist looks for what the French philosopher Michel Serres described as soft pollution. While we can measure what Serres described as "hard pollution"—the poisoning of the Earth—we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the "soft pollution" created by sound and images on our psyches.

As we rush through Night City, we become conscious of a kind of cognitive dissonance as the visceral, shimmering electronic virtual game world collides with 1940s and 1960s American commercial propaganda. "Inner Migration" encourages viewers to reflect on their internal perspectives regarding how Earth might look soon compared to earlier predictions. Depending on one's location and real-world perspective, the current global situation may already resemble the envisioned scenario.

"Andy Hughes’s Inner Migration takes viewers on an exhilarating ride through Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, juxtaposing dystopian game footage with archival films to contrast past visions of utopia with the harsh realities of a world under corporate dominance. The piece prompts reflection on the disparity between historical optimism and the current global situation, suggesting that for some, the dystopian imagery may already be a reality".

https://milanmachinimafestival.org/blog/2024/3/9/mmf-mmxxiv-slot-machinima

Film title: Shimmer (2024)
Runtime: 11 min

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.

Film title: Being Weird
Runtime: 13min 54sec

"Being Weird" was premiered at the London Surf Film Festival this year at Riverside Studios, London.

"Being Weird" invites you on a strange and thought-provoking journey through the past, present, and future mind of artist Andy Hughes. The story flows from the coalfields of Yorkshire, where the industrial landscape merges with surfing memories, to the Welsh coastline of 1990, where waves and trash carry both beauty and a future warning. It begins with the first Surfers Against Sewage demonstration—an early stand against ocean pollution—and moves toward the distant volcanic shores of South Korea, where land and sea converge.

For over 30 years, artist Andy Hughes has been exploring plastic waste and pollution along shorelines. He has collaborated with scientists, curators, NGOs, and local communities to expand and transform traditional approaches to raising awareness about ocean pollution. Originally from Yorkshire, but now living in Cornwall, Hughes finds his greatest joy while sitting on his surfboard, searching for a clean wave at Porthmeor Beach in St. Ives. “When I first noticed the impact of marine plastic and other waste debris while sitting on a surfboard more than 30 years ago in South Wales, it reminded me of the waste I grew up with in the coalfields of Yorkshire. But rather than being fixed and terrestrial, it was floating and suspended in the sea."

Being Plastic
Runtime: 5min 43sec

'Being Plastic' is a 5.43 min video loop created by artist Andy Hughes, originating from a series of video vignettes he produced while artist-in-residence on Gapado Island in South Korea. During a hot and humid summer on this tiny island, Hughes frequently found himself gazing at the dark ocean at night, where he observed numerous squid fishing boats several miles offshore. These boats have a substantial array of incredibly bright lights, which lure squid to their certain death. The intensity of these luminous displays generates an eerie, surreal glow that reflects off the ocean's surface, reaching up towards the sky. It creates the illusion that the sea is transmitting light from its depths, effectively reversing the natural process of daylight filtering down from the sky into the ocean.

This notion of reversing, mirroring, and shimmering light became just one part of his visual vocabulary, a starting point for this short film. Hughes began asking himself and imagining how these intelligent cephalopods might perceive the world through their large eyes. Using still photographs and iPhone video footage, Hughes created sculptures from discarded objects and then, through various techniques, sought to infuse vitality and presence into what some might think is 'lifeless' plastic waste material. In effect, a parallel trick like the way humans fish for squid.

“I define inner space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of inner space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.”

J.G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

Polyethylene Terephthalate, 2022
Single Channel HD video projection, runtime 2 mins, 07 seconds
Gapado AiR, South Korea, 2022

During Hughes' time on the Island of Gapado, he often found himself obsessed by the ocean's nocturnal allure, in conjunction with the strange beauty of the light reflections from the squid-fishing vessels that dotted the horizon. As they bobbed in the darkness, their lights pierced through the night, casting an ethereal, strange glow across the water and sky.

© Andy Hughes 2022 / No Unauthorised Copying

These squid-fishing boats employed arrays of intensely luminous bulbs to lure squid to their demise. The lights cast an otherworldly reflection upon the low clouds in the sky from the ocean's surface. Late one evening, in the act of contemplation of this scene, he placed a collected wasted PET bottle on Gapado AiR's roof terrace overlooking the small harbour. By juxtaposition of object and visual scene, Hughes draws us to consider the intricate web of human activities shaping the ocean's fate. Through this and his other artistic explorations, Hughes delves into the pressing issue of plastic pollution in our oceans, seeking to breathe life into discarded waste matter and provoke contemplation on humanity's impact on marine and wider ecosystems.

Oxygen Permeable, 2022
Single Channel HD video projection, runtime 1 min
Gapado AiR, South Korea, 2022

To imitate the calcareous tubes commonly found on shells, stones, and flotsam at the seashore. Hughes used moulded surf wax to attach tentacles onto this Turban shell that he collected from the rock pools on Gapado Island's coast. The turban shell or conch or Jeju's sora is also known as the Tangerine of the Sea. Collected in shallow sea areas around Jeju and Gapado Island along with abalone they are one of the primary sources of income for Haenyo 해녀 / sea women] female divers. Both video works are part of an ongoing series of video vignettes where still photographs are used and post-produced through various methods to bring life and presence to inanimate objects.

© Andy Hughes 2022 / No Unauthorised Copying

Polythene Palmer Alaska (single channel video, 2019)
Runtime 01.02

Polythene Palmer is one of a series of video vignettes made over a period of 10 years. Two objects are presented - the moving image to the left depicts a collected plastic bottle under the midnight sun, filmed aboard the RSV Norseman, moored at Hallo Bay in Alaska (2013). This remote location was just one of many places where Hughes made work as one of the invited artists for the world’s first scientific and combined artist expedition called Gyre: The Plastic Ocean. The expedition set out into the wilderness to explore the marine plastic problem (2013).

The image to the right was created 7 years later with another plastic bottle and black waste rubbish bags. Hughes manipulated the bag with his hands to make it look like the inside of a stomach, rippling and ingestion processes of squeezing are hinted at. In effect, the two interrelated videos were created independently, combined with the singing of indigenous Alaskans the work expresses the idea of the rhizome which allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in representation and interpretation.

Inner Migration, (2024)

Shimmer (2024), Burton Commission

Being Weird (2024), Preview Clip

Being Plastic, Video Clip, 2023/24

Polyethylene Terephthalate, 2022

Polythene Palmer, Alaska, 2019