Interviews & Reviews

    
                                            Email: richard at futurenatural dot net

 

Images, Animations, Engines
1986-2006

A5, 40 pages, black and white and colour illustrations

This is a monograph published to coincide with my show "How to Talk to Images" at the HTTP (now Furtherfield) Gallery in London in 2008. It turned out to be quite a Baroque affair, with Sean Cubitt contributing a dazzling essay and an interview between me and Charlie Gere.

 


Richard Wright is a visual artist working in animation, moving image and computational media including many early pioneering digital animated films and interactive installations. He holds a PhD in the aesthetics of digital cinema and has published nearly forty papers, articles and book chapters.

Key works include the animate! commissioned “Heliocentrum” (1995) - an animation about Louis XIV which was described by writer Hari Kunzru as “…both fun and an amazingly effective way of showing how a sovereign manipulated power” and "LMX Spiral", a conceptual music video about the eighties. “The Bank of Time” was a “vanitas” screensaver which was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2001. His last short film was “Foreplay” (2004), described as “a porn film without the sex”. His online project “How to Talk to Images” consisted of "The Internet Speaks" and "The Mimeticon" – a search engine that finds images by visual similarity and an artwork about the visual history of writing.

Richard helped set up the MA in Digital Art and Animation at London Metropolitan University and was postproduction and animation tutor at the National Film and Television School for three years.

From 2004 to 2009 he collaborated with Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji, initially as the artists group Mongrel and then as Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji. With them he set up their “social telephony” programme, the MediaShed “free-media” space in Southend-on-Sea and the “Cross Talk” eco-media project. Their last project “Tantalum Memorial” won the transmediale 09 award.

In 2015-16 he was artist-in-residence at the British Library and created a portrait of the early C19
th librarian Thomas Watts that also functions as a live visual catalogue (www.elasticSystem.net). He is currently researching an essay film series and a book exploring the history of animation as an art form and as a contemporary media practice.

Download a copy of my list cv here

Most of my films are distributed through LUX Distribution in London or the British Council.
I also have a DVD compilation which you can contact me about.

Contact me at: richard at futurenatural dot net.

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Some Interviews
& Reviews

 

 

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD WRIGHT, Gary Thomas 2009
AURORA Festival: Social Networks & Campfire Stories / AP Engine
An interview by Gary Thomas for the Aurora Festival on the subject of networks and the moving image. I talk about the relation between the internet, what to do with a lot of images and "animated media".
Down load the text here (.pdf 751K)

THE BANK OF TIME, Geoff Cox 2004
Read_Me: Software Art and Cultures, (ed.) edited by Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, University of Aarhus Press, Denmark, 2004.
This is a very nice write up that Geoff did for this book from the University of Aarhus. I couldn't have put it better myself.
Down load the text here (.doc 166K)

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD WRIGHT / BANK OF TIME 2002
An interview that Matthew Fuller did on the occassion of The Bank of Time getting popular. Distributed over mailing lists like Nettime during 2002.
Download the text here (.txt 18K)

FLAME WARS WITH LOUIS XIV, Hari Kunzru 1997
WIRED magazine, July 1997, p 154.
A glowing review that Hari Kunzru wrote about Heliocentrum for WIRED magazine that generarted many requests for the video.
Download the text here (.doc 38K)