Unfolding Worlds – Showcase & John Gerrard Artist Talk

Bio

Jes Benstock is a creative practitioner whose output spans film, large-scale live projections, animation, and interactive digital art. His distinctive visual style is informed by a deep fascination with technology and psychology often employed with a playful and gentle humour.

Jes Benstock was part of the innovative live projected visuals scene in London in the 90s. He designed and animated projections for world tours with major musical acts, including My Bloody Valentine, Orbital, Catatonia, and Richard Ashcroft. His installation work includes the live video interactive piece “The Effect” with Melissa Bliss which was commissioned for the Stoke Newington Festival and subsequently toured digital arts events and festivals with the Arts Council. He created also with Melissa Bliss, the “Mirror Screen” a site specific installation for the “Towpath” exhibition in Camden projecting custom visuals of the early internet onto a screen made of 50000 mirrors. For the Big Chill Festival, he created “Universal Gyrator,” an interactive back-projection of the planets onto a spherical screen, and “Mouthfeel,” projected onto a life-size fibreglass cow floating on a lily pond. He collaborated with AudioRom as part of their Artists Residency in STEIM in Amsterdam and was responsible for creating additional animation and collage projections for Terry Gilliam’s English National Opera production of Berlioz’s “Faust”

Squat City 73

Squat City 73 is a Digital Happening which unearths a lost history of the counterculture.

In the midst of a financial crisis and a housing crisis, over 100000 houses lay empty in London. Kentish Town was a hotbed of the new squatting counterculture – the entire length of Prince of Wales Crescent was entirely squatted by hippies and artists and spawned an amazing culture – housing artists like Malcolm LeGrice and the Filmmakers Co-op.

Amongst them were Hoppy and Sue – Sue was a squatter and a housing activist while Hoppy built on his experience as a photojournalist and one of the founders of TVX – the first counterculture video collective in the 1960s. They came together around issues of housing and wanting to create a better society.

They started to use the new black and white open reel video “Portapacks”, not to make documentaries but as an analytical tool; for campaigning, organising and motivating other squatters. They called it “Decentralised TV” and shot over 100x 30 minute videotapes in a two year period 1973-4, covering local squatter festivals, political meetings, interviews with councillors and single parent family squatters – and brutal arrests and evictions. Their tapes were shown to small groups as there was no effective way to distribute video in those days.

This piece is an introduction to a larger interactive work which aims to bring the audience back in time to the now demolished Prince of Wales Crescent and  to share Hoppy and Sue’s outsider videos and their philosopy – while showing the tensions with the council, the police, local residents, the National Front.

In this presentation we will focus two of the videotapes which Hoppy and Sue refer to as “Squat Now While Stocks Last”. The tapes cover the eviction of 93 Prince of Wales Road which ends in violent arrests. An edited version of the videos ended up on Nationwide (national UK early evening news magazine) and helped the squatters get off all charges in the subsequent court case… the first time that video had been used in this way…

Before they were evicted Hoppy and Sue set up Fantasy Factory – the first independent video editing facility for artists and community groups – which operated until the early 1990s

Bio

Magz Hall is a sound artist who works in the UK and internationally. Her sound and radio art often spans various platforms, including installations, micro-broadcasts, live streams, on-demand content, podcasts, and traditional broadcasts.

Her work explores themes such as art for the environment, radio art, expanded radio, expanded sculpture, and wireless technology. These explorations have led to notable works like Tree Radio for Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Transmission Spores as part of the Ash Archive.

Magz is currently developing a series of expanded and immersive sound art and radio works focused on air and water pollution at landfills, which grew out of her Radio Air Garden project.

Her work has received significant recognition, including a highly commended Oram Award in 2021. Her radiophonic installation and poem, Waves of Resistance, commissioned for Galway 2020, was nominated for an Ivor Novello in Sound Art, and Tree Radio at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015 was nominated for a BASCA in sound art.

She completed a practice-based PhD titled, Radio after Radio, Redefining Radio Art in light of new media technology through expanded practice, at CRISAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) at UAL. She is always open to collaborations and commissions. magzhall.com

Asset Dump –  This is not a new Giza (work in progress)

Learning how the Unreal Engine works has been eye opening experience. 

This is a sketch for a future educational interactive landfill site; to take you to places you would never want to go and learn about specific issues, like how fires are caused.

During the lab I discovered the world of virtual assets, individual items found in games and VR, sold in huge digital stores like Epic, a vast digital junkyard, where real-world items are painstaking produced for sale to those developing games and, in our case, virtual worlds. Anything can be purchased for a price some assets are free, most are not aesthetically pleasing and somethings  I wanted to do were not possible in the time frame.

The experience reminded me of sci-fi writer Philip K Dick’s Perky Pat game; he predicted a future where colonists on Mars live horrible lives trapped in caves and took a drug called Can-D to allow them to experience virtual layouts of homes and communities back on earth.

The digital junk you can see here is the tip of an iceberg really; I discovered it is slow, painful and time-consuming work to place unique items separately on the landfill  – so with very limited time and no budget, it was about getting a feeling, this is why you are seeing similar waste items.

It also got me thinking about the low paid workers in third world countries who make assets and programme virtual worlds, and the digital waste we don’t see and my teenage son who spends his all his days in a dark room which is quite cave like, making assets on blender under the light of his PC. 

Huge thanks to Gavin and Tom and everyone at Screen South. 

Sound and Music Magz Hall, Peter Coyte and Hélène Williams. 

Bio

Tamsin is a scriptwriter with a background in theatre, having worked as an actor and producer. She founded Tender, a charity using the arts to prevent domestic and sexual violence in 2003 and developed theatre projects and short films in collaboration with young people.  Recent scriptwriting successes have included radio play Angry Bird, broadcast on Near FM and selected for the UK International Audio Drama Competition; and Planet Rising – TV pilot optioned by The Writers Lab UK & Ireland.  Since 2023, she’s been developing immersive storytelling projects trained through Screen South’s programmes, including developing her project BIRDS as a VR game through BFI funded Develop, Create XR with BRiGHTBLACK. 

PROGRESS?

Inspired by Folkestone Fringe themes of ‘Flint & Clay’ I explored the local composition of the land, making trips to Folkestone Museum, East Cliff and Copt Point.  I was interested in evidence of Neolithic settlements and tool-making, but became captivated by learning about Folkestone’s importance in the local area for producing quern-stones. 

The quern-stone was a revolutionary tool invented in the Stone Age – possibly in Syria – to grind grain into flour.  It was an important tool in the progression from hunter gather societies to settled farming; sometimes called the Neolithic Revolution.  

In Folkestone, from approx. 800 BCE to 1st Century CE, Greensand stone was quarried at Copt Point’s cliff base and dragged up the steep slope from Folkestone Warren beach to East Cliff.  Here they were carved by Iron Age stone masons and traded across England and into Europe.   

Historians also think that as farming communities – over millennia – concentrated wealth and power, the Neolithic Revolution created the conditions for enduring economic inequality.  Which got me thinking about ‘progress’ in human societies, and subsequent transformative eras – like the Industrial and Technological Revolutions. 

Each one brings extraordinary opportunities for transformation of energy into wealth and power, but at what cost?

Bio

Mark is a Kent based artist and illustrator. For twenty years he has visualised for architects and interior designers using traditional drawing-based visualisations integrated with new media. His interest in film and animation has resulted in a concept art folio aimed at pre-and-post-production.

His approach involves process-led investigations using the language of drawing and painting. The resulting images vary from academic to very abstract; visual poems using graphic layering, linear work and intense colour. He likes to retain a visual history within his work through a method of mark-making that responds directly to the tools and materials being used.

Sightings

For his Unfolding Worlds project, Mark has used the Unreal Engine to translate the approach to materials and process found in his painting to a digitally rendered visual and time-based environment which draws inspiration from the Folkestone Area. The project plays with new methods of composition, reimagining local subject matter and creating fragments of narrative in an imaginative way.

Bio

George is an Essex-based artist-filmmaker, producer (EVA Productions), and facilitator.

His creative practice as a socially engaged artist-filmmaker extends beyond documentation and the moving image; it’s fundamentally driven by his passion to converse, collaborate and celebrate untold stories with communities using experimental and traditional filmic tools. His work explores themes of identity, time, class and trauma using non-fiction and archival material to challenge the current norm.

Previous work includes an anthology of six moving image films for his Basildon-based video art exhibition ‘When I Say Essex, What Do You See?’, and a two-channel film called ‘Awojoh, Fusing Memory And Land With Liquid And Nourishment’ which made its premier in the Estuary 2025 Festival film programme.

Flags and their true colours

A man’s gaze is fixed on a strung-up flag outside his bedroom window. Something simple yet sinister. The flag that now covers his street triggers his memories that turn into abstract stripes of light, rushing from his past and flashing across his face as he remembers the relationship he once had with that particular flag.