Turner Prize 2009

If you could nominate any artist working with film, video, animation for the Turner Prize who would it be?

This year's Turner Prize shortlist consists of a sculptor, a surrealist, a Lucy Skaer and a painter called Richard Wright (no relation to the curator of our Computer Baroque exhibition) - not a video artist in sight. Since Mark Leckey received the prize last year for his animation lecture Cinema in the Round, I wonder if this is some kind of backlash? For one, Jonathan Jones, Guardian critic and one of this year's judges, found all of last year's nominees decidedly dull it seems.

This got me thinking of a dream team Turner Prize shortlist of artists/filmmakers, as there is such a wealth of artists working with film in the UK - Clio Barnard, Ben Rivers, Wood and Harrison, David Shrigley (why has he never been nominated?), Sebastian Buerkner, Ann Course, Sarah Miles, Cory Arcangel, AL and AL (recent Liverpool Art Prize winners), Dryden Goodwin, Lindsay Seers, Jordan Baseman, Neeta Madahar...

So what do you think? If you could nominate who would it be? Comment below or email to info@animateprojects.org if you're shy.


A (film) history of the Turner Prize:
1994 - Willie Doherty was the first video artist to be nominated ten years after the award was launched
1996 - Douglas Gordon, creator of 24 Hour Psycho,was the first video artist to win
1997 - won by photographer and filmmaker Gillian Wearing
1998 - Sam Taylor-Wood and Tacita Dean were both nominated
1999 - Steve McQueen was awarded the prize, filmmakers Jane and Louise Wilson were also nominated
2001 - Isaac Julien nominated, a year of controversy as Martin Creed wins for conceptually animating a space in Work No. 227: The lights going on and off
2003 - Willie Doherty nominated for the second time
2004 - Jeremy Deller wins, all four nominated artists (Kutlug Ataman, Langlands and Bell, Yinka Shonibare, Jeremy Deller) use video and documentary to explore political themes
2005 - Darren Almond nominated for his four-screen installation If I Had You
2006 - Phil Collins nominated for his exploration of representations of reality
2007 - Zarina Bhimji nominated
2008 - Mak Leckey wins for his investigations into animating ideas and objects, Runa Islam nominated for her choreographed film installations


Image: David Shrigley

Move It on 28 April

We'll be at Picture This in Bristol on 28 April, from 7.30pm, presenting Move It - discussion, drinks, drawing and a delightful screening.

Gary Thomas, Co-director of Animate Projects, will be discussing the process and practices of making drawings move with artists Mark Simon Hewis, Thomas Hicks, John Parry and Sarah Cox. Plus the audience will be invited to have a drink and take part in some drawing as well.

Move It is one event for the Drawing Exchange Festival, which takes place across Bristol 25 April-3 May.

Come join in the fun...


Image: Who I Am and What I Want, David Shrigley and Chris Shepherd

Computer Baroque - now online

We are proud to present Computer Baroque, curated by Richard Wright, online from 14 April to 7 July 2009.

Computer Baroque is a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image, featuring computer animation pioneers: Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright.

And there's a great accompanying essay by Richard Wright that explains his choice of films.

"Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration. It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial." Richard Wright.

Please feel free to feed back any comments you have about the exhibition here. Thanks.


Image: Heliocentrum, Jason White and Richard Wright

We recommend: The Politics in the Room/Evolving

A sort of graduation show for the first cohort of artists on the LUX Associate Artists Programme - a post-academic 12 month professional development course for artists working with the moving image - there are eight online works to view here.

And...LUX is showing four 'Darwin related' films from its collection, including a couple of Animate commissions, another film that we should have commissioned, and yet another by an artist we'd like to work with...

Abandon Normal Devices - call for submissions

We are thrilled to have been working with FACT Liverpool on the Primitive project. The installation and cinema short get their UK premiere at FACT's Abandon Normal Devices festival in September...and their call for submission is live...deadline 7 May...

Poop! - call for dirty movies!

We love the Poopy Poopy Poopy song from Malcolm in the Middle,

And now, the London International Festival of Animation is looking for..well, not dirty films, but films that deal with the serious issues of sanitation. There's a £1,000 prize and the deadline is 15th May 2009.

The competition is run in collaboration with Poop - set up to promote, educate and facilitate a wider understanding of life’s basic necessities – principally sanitation and clean water.

Details here.

We recommend: Susan Collins - Seascape

An exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on England's south coast, and online here.

"a series of gradually unfolding digital seascapes created using imagery captured in real time by webcams installed at five key vantage points along the south coast between Margate and Portsmouth."

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion, Seascape is a brilliant, beautifully expanded work - about what the world is (now), where we are in the world..and where we're not!

We recommend: Garden Pieces at BFI Southbank, London

A wonderful welcome to Spring in these delightful programmes curated by artist filmmaker Peter Todd. A broad range of horticulturally connected works, in turn beautiful, quirky, dark, and generally mesmerising. Including Avant-garde classics, with some anthropological and early cinema diversions.

"With works from 100 years of cinema, and from Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Robert Beavers, Stan Brakhage, Rose Lowder, Percy Smith, and Margaret Tait amongst others."


14 April - 28 April 2009
More info, times, and booking here.

Image: Mothlight, Stan Brakhage

We recommend: Semiconductor's new film

Black Rain...it's awesome - "sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO". The universe reimagined - or revealed - as a structuralist hallucinogenic spectacle thing. Eamesian Now.