Martha Fiennes: In Conversation
(This is a past event and is no longer running)
The Ghost, The Machine, the Artist and the AI
Martha Fiennes in conversation with Peter Muggleston, The Revd Dr Richard Davey, Carl Grinter and Adam Abraham Cubitt
Join us in our main auditorium for a conversation with award-winning filmmaker, director, artist and creator of Yugen and Nativity, Martha Fiennes. Fiennes will be joined by producer of Yugen and Nativity Peter Muggleston, chaplain and arts writer The Rev’d Dr Richard Davey, immersive media specialist and coder of Yugen Carl Grinter, and coder of Nativity Adam Abraham Cubitt. Together they will discuss philosophy, art, film, metaphysics, consciousness, the mind, digital systems, coding and the dreaded AI!
Tickets are free, however booking is essential. Fiennes’ Yugen & Nativity will be open to view before and after the talk – find out more here.
About the Panellists
Martha Fiennes is an award-winning filmmaker, director and artist. Her multi-layered work is informed by technological developments and ideas in contemporary art whilst maintaining the artistic expression of a highly gifted filmmaker. Her debut artwork Nativity, 2011 has been exhibited at the V&A, the National Gallery, Sotheby’s London and Paris and the Venice Biennale 2017 and The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg June /December 2018. Her more recent work Yugen (2018) takes this pioneering media into new realms. Yugen has been exhibited at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, LACMA (Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art); Christie’s New York and Art Dubai.
Fiennes has directed two high profile feature films including the sumptuous Russian period piece Onegin, starring Liv Tyler and Ralph Fiennes. Onegin, which won the Tokyo Film Festival, was also nominated for a BAFTA for Best British Film in 1999 and won her the London Critics Award for Best Newcomer. Her second feature Chromophobia attracted a star studded cast (Penelope Cruz, Damian Lewis, Kristin Scott Thomas) and was applauded for its powerful contemporary style and ‘icy and superb script’. Chromophobia, both written and directed by Martha closed the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. She is an active member of the UK film industry and has served on several BAFTA juries. In 2015 she headed the Film Jury at the annual Film Festival in Tblisi, Georgia.
Peter Muggleston is an award winning director and producer with a wealth of experience at making television commercials, cinema trailers, corporate videos, sponsorship campaigns & digital domain projects in both this country & abroad, working across a whole range of FMCG brands.
Pete has worked for both Production Companies & Advertising Agencies, always at the very cutting edge of technology. He was a founding member of the UK’s top contemporary Animation Studio Blink, & then invited to work at one of the UK’s seminal Advertising Agencies, HHCL & Partners which was voted Agency of the Millennium by Campaign magazine. Here Pete produced the Blackcurrant Tango ad “St George “ voted Film 4ʼs best long commercial of the 20th Century & becoming one of the 100 best commercials of all time.
Working with Fiennes and her company, SLOimage, Peter was the producer of both Nativity & Yugen.
The Rev’d Dr Richard Davey writes on contemporary art and artists. He has written books and catalogue essays on artists including Anselm Kiefer, Tess Jaray, Anthony Whishaw and Leonard McComb. He has written the catalogue for Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and was a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2016. He is a Senior Research Fellow in the Nottingham School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University and also the University’s Chaplain.
Carl Grinter is an animation, visual effects and immersive media designer, supervisor, producer and consultant working in the UK digital arts, immersive media, feature film, documentary, advertising and music networks at the leading edge of creative practices and emerging technologies, tools and their design applications.
Carl has a PhD awarded for practice-based doctoral research specialising in the role of surprise in design, production and reception of Immersive Media from University of the Arts London. He has an MBA specialising in creative businesses, entrepreneurship and innovation. He is currently working as part of a team on a long term project producing documentary-based educational films supporting the transition from oil economies to more sustainable economies. He works as a virtual production (VP) and visual effects (VFX) supervisor and producer through his own company Three Wise Monkeys and with a specialist VP studio based at Twickenham Film Studios. He is researching integrations and workflows bringing real time animation game engines together with generative AI content creating workflows integrating practices in visual effects and computer animation gained over 35 years for art, commercial and innovation projects. He is interested in telling new types of stories and developing technologies leading to greater digital media inclusion.
Adam Abraham Cubitt was already coding whilst on his foundation art course at the Kent Institute of Art & Design before he later moved to the National Centre for Computing Animation where he fully succumbed to the Dark Side and has been coding in earnest ever since.
His career has taken him through special effects, medical simulation, shopfront displays, point-of-sales systems, installation based computer games, fitness experiences, large-scale signage systems – to name but a few.