Animate Projects Observer

Simon Faithfull

This month we delve into the Animate Collection to take a look at 13, Simon Faithfull’s captivating AnimateTV commission from 2004. The film depicts a journey through a melancholy urban landscape ‘in the mind of a dying dog sniffing its way back to its birthplace in Barking’. Created from pixelated PalmPilot drawings, the sparse animation evokes a world of car showrooms, ring roads and ghost lorries in the night. 13 can be seen from June to August 2012 at the Canary Wharf Screen, along with a selection other films from the Animate Collection.

Simon has exhibited widely in both international solo and group exhibitions and his work can be found in the Arts Council Collection, The Government Art Collection and the V22 collection. In 2004/5 he made a two-month journey to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, where he made daily drawings of his surroundings on a PalmPilot which were then relayed back to the world via email.

In Escape Vehicle no.6, one of a series of experiments Simon conducted between 1995 and 2005, a domestic chair was lifted into the air by weather balloon. An audience first witnessed the chair disappear into the sky and then watched a live video transmission from the balloon showing the chair reaching an altitude of 30 km high. Seen against the blackness of space and the curvature of the earth the chair finally broke up at the edge of space. Watch the extraordinary video below (and see Toshiba’s ‘homage’ here).

More information on Simon Faithfull and his work can be found here.