22 November 2024 – 1 March 2025

Free entry

Shimmer is an experimental machinima film artwork that combines photographic assemblage, archival film, and video game imagery. It was commissioned by The Burton in 2024 as part of our series of Environmental Commissions.

The film 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.

Filmed footage made through a rolled-up sheet of plastic trash and animated stills from the Taw-Torridge Estuary joins a plastic dinosaur connected to dancing bottle tops, bulging mud banks, and virtual oily sewage slicks. The artwork employs motion, rhythm, light, and composition to evoke emotions and stimulate elements of pareidolia, where viewers interpret familiar subjects and patterns in ambiguous stimuli. The film integrates visual and metaphorical ellipses, shifting points of focus, and temporal skips that aim to condense and shift time, offering a narrative approach that challenges conventional storytelling about plastic waste, pollution, and climate change.