During Covid restrictions I have been working with mixed archive and animation to create short films which explore the thoughts that settle into my mind. Some of these are explorations of form as much as of content.

Reds under the bed

Since the 2016 US Presidential Election, the threat of Russian interference in the form of hackers and online bots has loomed large in almost every Western election. There is no question of Russian interference, it is not a disputed fact, it happened, repeatedly. But four years on, are we once again creating a bogeyman which can be blamed for all outpouring of internal political and social divisions. 60 years after the Red Scare in the US, should we always be searching for the hackers or is it a convenient scapegoat instead of confronting the fundamentals with which our society is struggling?

Reds Under the Bed explores this concept of returning to the situations past in the future, ie back to the future, through the use of US Government Cold War archive material and contemporary Russian archive in a narrative inspired by a recent anonymous opinion article in the Irish Examiner, in which a bully’s mother defends her son, claiming the online bullying was in fact the work of Russian hackers. This unlikely scenario leads us on a journey into a hacked computer which recalls the era of the Cold War, predicting a future that we may have already experienced.

cyberspace escapes

Despite the testing successes of multiple vaccines, it seems unlikely that we will escape the restrictions on normality anytime soon. This has made life on any other planet sound particularly attractive right now. However, for those of us lacking a couple of hundred million to bankroll our spaceflight perhaps there's another of connecting to another planet. Meteorites. Cyberspace escapes briefly dives into the world of people connecting to space on earth, the only way we can these days, through a web browser and endless old movies.