Nowness x UVA
2017
Commissioned by NOWNESS, Illuminating is a trilogy of films directed by Ryan Hopkinson. The series takes viewers through the 15-year trajectory of United Visual Artists’ practice by highlighting the process behind specific artworks across temporary, public and architectural installations and collaborations in live performance.
The Shared Experience features projects with Massive Attack and James Blake and investigates UVA’s treatment of light as a means to communicate information—and misinformation, it’s ephemeral form and the physical and emotional effects that light can cause.
The second episode, Time, focuses UVA’s interest in rhythms, patterns and cycles. Featuring footage of Our Time and on location as UVA unveils Musica Universalis, a temporary kinetic light sculpture at the Day for Night festival in Houston, TX, the film reveals UVA’s preoccupation with our perceptions of reality and humans’ natural understanding of the man-made phenomena that is time.
Third episode Man and Machine considers the grey area between the natural and the technological and the deeper enigma of being human through the lens of artworks: Message from the Unseen World at Paddington Central, London (a memorial to pioneering British codebreaker and computer scientist Alan Turing) and 440Hz at MONA, Tasmania where a work that considers the body as a unique, biological machine.
Viewed together, the three-part series sheds light on UVA’s working process and ongoing artistic enquiry that often transports audiences to a different, fabricated reality to challenge perceptions that day-to-day we take for granted.
