Digital Reel: Creative Computing Film Screenings

Join us for an evening of short films where cinema meets code. Digital Reel presents eight works created with creative computing technologies.

Screened together for one night only, the programme offers a rare chance to experience how filmmakers and artists are using computation not just as a tool, but as a medium in its own right.

SHATTRD by uoshi
'SHATTRD' is an experimental machinima created from footage captured in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, including modified and pirated versions of the game. Through glitches, dithering, image degradation, and digital interventions, the film transforms the videogame environment into a fragmented audiovisual essay. Set within a virtual world trapped in cycles of repetition and rebooting, the work follows a character whose identity gradually dissolves across multiple iterations of himself. Moving between video art, essay film, and videogame cinema, SHATTRD uses the visual language of technological decay to explore themes of obsolescence, performance, and digital subjectivity. Running 5 min., the film repurposes a familiar game world as a space for experimentation, where software instability and image deterioration become narrative and aesthetic elements.

How to Excel at Everything by Marion Balac
In 'How to Excel at Everything', two Pokemon-like friends embark on a journey together to master every skill possible through online tutorials.
Freely adapted from Flaubert's unfinished book 'Bouvard et Pécuchet' (published posthumously in 1881), 'How to Excel at Everything' explores the dynamics operating in our current era of online self-study and YouTube tutorials. Guided by algorithmic recommendations, B and P try to learn everything without any pedagogical compass, falling into a new rabbit hole everyday. Exploring the thin interstice between online DIY culture and the dismantling of institutional pedagogical structures, 'How to Excel at Everything' translates the gamification of our lives and the rise of self-help culture into a learning odyssey.

Eye Lynx by Catherine Chapman
Catherine Chapman’s animated short film reflects on the effect of the infinite scroll mechanism. Deriving its title from ludic theorist Roger Callois’ 1961 text ‘Man, Play and Games’, 'Eye Lynx' is a play on words of ilinx, a pleasurable vertigo or spinning sensation.
An invisible figure is draped in computer simulated fabric, jumping into the air in slow motion. Projected on the material are found images scrolled by hand, and screen recorded. A fragmented dialog is voiced by the artist, her grandmother, and a silent interrogatory actor whose words are only subtitled. The voices describe the images onscreen and make commentary on life during ‘screen time’. A fragment of poetry from Emily Dickinson features as a provocation, and a knowing laugh fades into the distance. Accompanied by sound design by Tarquin Manek, this is a film that questions what is worth giving our attention to.

Rule 30 (there are no girls on the internet) by Erinne Huston
Rule 30 (there are no girls on the internet) parallels my history as someone who was often considered to be a man online. I didn’t actively pretend. I just never spoke or showed my face. But the assumption in the spaces I’ve inhabited is that any ordinary user is a man. The face of anonymity is stereotype.
The visual quality of Rule 30 was a direct result of the difficulties of keying out a green screen. In previous films I've worked on, the effort placed into ensuring there were no shadows cast onto the screen felt like I was actively working against the materiality of green-screen itself. Therefore, I shot the film deliberately ignoring as many of these rules as possible to ensure this materiality, this 'crust', shines through and forms characters that can tell a story despite being half-invisible.

The Nest by Grier Iana
'The Nest' is a 3-minute short animated film that is a commentary on online herd mentality, and the effects of an algorithm that only shows you what you want to hear. The dialogue and conversations heard throughout are interpretations of message threads, capturing the combative behaviour of individuals trying to assert their opinions and prove their points.
To bring this world to life, I created a society of insect-like creatures that swarm around one another in collective agreement, reflecting the echo chambers and groupthink that define so much of online discourse.

p0wer vect0rs by Helena Nikonole
'p0wer vect0rs' (2025–2026) is an ongoing artistic research project investigating how contemporary vision-language models encode political, ethical, and affective assumptions through their latent representations.
Rather than treating AI systems as neutral tools, the project approaches large language models and diffusion models as opaque techno-social infrastructures shaped by training data, moderation protocols, reward optimization, and corporate alignment. Through deliberate misuse, critical prompting, and experimental interrogation, models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Stable Diffusion, and text-to-3D systems are pushed beyond their intended use in order to expose their internal inconsistencies and failure modes.
The series combines found prompts from leaked chatbot conversations, multilingual image-to-image experiments, abstract text-to-3D generation, and interactive installations. By forcing models to process concepts such as ideology, post-truth, love, or traumatic experience, the work reveals how meaning is unevenly distributed across latent space. While language models statistically encode both abstract and concrete concepts, diffusion-based systems operate primarily through visual correlations. When confronted with abstract prompts that resist straightforward visualisation, these systems often destabilise, producing semi-abstract forms, glitches, and unexpected associations.

Cyborg Needs No Redemption by Sofia Talanti
'Cyborg Needs No Redemption' is a 4K 3D animation exploring the intersection of biotechnology and spiritual transcendence, inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and the visual power of Gustave Doré's engravings. These ancient narratives are reimagined through a contemporary lens: a cyborg, representing a biblically accurate angel that embarks on a journey of self-discovery and redemption.
Constructed from 3D scans of cancerous tissues and neural structures, the cyborg angel embodies the fusion of organic life and artificial. This hybrid being navigates a hellish landscape reflecting the chaotic interplay between disease, decay, and the struggle for survival, an environment blending the organic and the mechanical, mirroring the torment of the modern existential condition.

IT GIRL by Raw2.2 and Alex Quicho
Become more beautiful than the highest 4K Quality CGI. 'IT GIRL' presents the mind-body horror of pursuing beauty under conditions that demand constant self-improvement. Set between a white void and a dark hotel room, the film unfolds as hallucinatory voices instruct, persuade, and affirm the main character as she morphs into her idealised self—her digital twin.
The script draws from empirical studies on chatbot scheming and sycophancy, human love letters, song lyrics, and clandestine "beauty subliminal" documents found in YouTube comments—tracing how we are shaped by our machines, and how we shape them in return. The beauty and terror of merging with alien companions that resemble us but don't share our values.
I want to show you happiness, so you don't have to fear it.