is an ongoing cycle of animated films and moving image installations. 

Volumes of ANIMATE BODIES & MECHANICAL MINDS have been exhibited and screened at contemporary art museums including TENT Rotterdam, Boijmans Museum Rotterdam, M HKA Antwerp, KASK Gent, Carpenter Centre Harvard, EYE filmmuseum, and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Films in the cycle have been screened at numerous international film festivals including 68th Venice International Film Festival (Venice Biennale): Orizzonti Competition: CPH:DOX Copenhagen: The London Film Festival and The Rotterdam International Film.

Research awards for the early stage of this work include a UK NESTA ‘Dreamtime’ fellowship and a Harvard University Film Study Centre Research Fellowship. Recent volumes have been supported by a research professorship at the Piet Zwart Institute for Graduate Studies Rotterdam. Many of the museum exhibitions and screenings have been close collaborations with Curator Edwin Carels in his roles as Senior Curator of the Rotterdam International Film Festival & Research Professor at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten van Gent.

Below are details of the completed volumes 

A single screen animated film for cinema and gallery: colour, 5.1 surround sound, 20 minutes long.
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FRANKENSTEIN'S DREAM is an animated film without words – until the very end. The film opens on strange satellites releasing spores over foraging humanoids. The infected creatures start to change and grow, to struggle towards speech. But there’s a bloody price.  FRANKENSTEIN'S DREAM asks: do we control Al technology and language, or are they parasites that use us as a host and breeding ground?

The digital puppets of FRANKENSTEIN'S DREAM are created by wrapping layers of watercolour drawings - made of blood, bone-black, ivory, and sundry other pigments, onto 3D CGI skeletons and digital scans of real human and animal skulls.

The dead human skulls and skeletons borrow life from the living as the movements of dancers BOSTON GALLACHER & ELIANA STRAGAPEDE are  motion-captured and given to the puppets to endow them with life. The creatures' actions in FRANKENSTEIN'S DREAM are genuinely human performances choreographed by GABRIELA CARRIZO of the PEEPING TOM DANCE THEATRE COMPANY.

The action is set in a world both constructed and scanned using architectural scanning techniques to create a series buildings and machines of control. The disparate elements of the images were woven together at RAMMW3RK post-production under the VFX supervision of Barend Onneweer.

The film's music is composed by ROGER GOULA and performed by the ECHO COLLECTIVE STRING QUARTET.

FRANKENSTEIN'S DREAM is Volume IV of ANIMATE BODIES and MECHANICAL MINDS.

Director/Animator: Simon Pummell
Writers: Simon Pummell and Margot Knijn
Producer: seriousFilm (Netherlands) - Visual Antics (Belgium) - Hot Property Productions
Animation Prototypes: Simon Pummell
VFX animator: Barend Onneweer at Raamw3rk
Status: Currently touring Film Festival and Film Museums
Funded by: Netherlands Film Fund, Flemish Audiovisual Fund, Flanders Tax Shelter & Tax Shelter of Belgian Federal Government

Atlas for Animate Bodies - combines digital animation processes with traditional figure drawing to create a new atlas of the human figure. Every volume of the Atlas exists both as a series of digital animations and also as a unique, hand-crafted book of the watercolours used to create the moving images. Traditionally our anatomies were associated with the flayed and dissected corpse, and so with death. In a world of hospital x-rays, medical scans and routine airport scanning we have become transparent: living and moving anatomies.

The ATLAS FOR ANIMATE BODIES: DRAMATIS PERSONAE comprises of the first five PLATES of the ATLAS  

Initial research into new techniques was supported by a Harvard Film Study Center Fellowship 2008-2009.  On-going research project is supported by the Research Professorship Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University.

Volume One has been exhibited as an installation at:

Museum Exhibition:  THE VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM LONDON                                       Sept 2013
Lecture and Screening: EYE FILM MUSEUM AMSTERDAM Cinema as Mind’s Eye                Oct 2013
Museum Exhibition:  KASK Ghent. Group Show: Post Mortem                                                Dec 2016
Conference screening:   ITEMP Imagineering in the Early Modern Period                              Mar 2019
Exhibition : VANDOHOVE GALLERY Ghent ITEMP                                                                    Mar 2109

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The total drawings for each plate of Atlas for Animate Bodies are assembled into a single large-scale book. Each book is hand bound in traditional cloth and leather in a form that exhoes the large scale editions of 17th century anatomical atlases. Each book (and the associated moving drawing) thus becomes a single edition (numbered and signed).

Individual drawings are hinged to allow temporary removal from the binding of the large book, in order to allow framing for exhibition.

Museum Exhibition:  KASK Ghent. Group Show: Post Mortem                                                Dec 2016

Within days of the launch of the first satellite ever - Prosteishii Sputnik (PS-1) - on October 4th1957, patients at Psychiatric casualty units were displaying delusions of being tracked by, and receiving messages from, the Sputnik. This phenomenon is informally referred to by psychiatrists as The Sputnik Effect. It is a moment marked by psychiatric commentators as the 'death of God' as the all-seeing persecutor in psychotic delusions, and the definitive ascendancy of technologies of control and surveillance as the key agents of persecution in the cosmic constructions of psychotic patients.

The installation uses the technology of 1950s pulp B-Movies to re-invent Daniel Paul Schreber's visions of fearsome nineteenth century communication machines as sci-fi icons and to mark the moment in the 1950s informally referred to by psychiatrists as TheSputnik Effect.

Part of the Shock Head Soul transmedia project produced by Hot Property Productions UK and Submarine Productions NL, in association with Illuminations Films UK and in co production with Serious Film NL, and Supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Netherlands Film Fund and the Rotterdam Media Fund, with support from the The Harvard Film Study Center. A research project affiliated to the lectorate of Piet Zwart Institute Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University.

Entrance: Monitor displaying PAL archive footage of Sputnik launch and orbit
Room 1:  Seven framed inkjet prints each 106cm x 106cm
Room 2:  Two screen 3D video projection
Room 3:  Single screen 3D video projection

Exhibited as a stand-alone installation at:
M HKA Antwerp - in Graphology 02                                                                                             May 2011
TENT Rotterdam - The Sputnik Effect                                                                                          Jan 2012
SMART PROJECT SPACE – Amsterdam                                                                                        May 2012
Melbourne IFF – Seventh Gallery – Melbourne                                                                             July 2012
Lecture and Screening: EYE FILM MUSEUM AMSTERDAM Cinema as Mind’s Eye                     Oct 2013

A feature length documentary using drama, animation and interviews to explore the relationship between society, psychosis and technology.  The project forms a portrait of Daniel Paul Schreber the C19th outsider artist who elaborated a steam-punk vision of a machine universe penetrated by networks of ‘nerve-rays’, with himself at the very centre as ‘God’s chosen bride’.

“Weirdness, cerebral depth and envelope-pushing style. Blending documentary elements with fictional reconstruction and trippy CGI, the pic is a truly sui generis work, both moving and intellectually stimulating.”   Variety

"the art of cinema, storytelling and the field of psychiatry together in this unique achievement...."   Screen International

"an unparalleled job of documenting the unphotographable."   Sight and Sound UK

"imposante rol van Hugo Koolschijn, kom maar op met dat Gouden Kalf "  Filmkrant (****)

" effectieve mengvorm van documentaire, fictie, waan en animatie"  NRC Handelsblad (****)

"Hugo Koolschijn speelt Schreber meesterlijk "   Het Parool (****)

A Submarine, Hot Property & Serious Film production for the Netherlands Film Fund and the Rotterdam Media Fund, The Wellcome Trust Major Arts Award UK, and with support from the Harvard Film Study Center.  The project was developed in collaboration with psychoanalyst Helen Taylor-Robinson with the support of a Wellcome Trust Arts Award.

Netherlands Release       Cinema Delicatessen
UK Release                         Soda Pictures UK
TV sales                            Several European Territories

Selected Festival Awards, Nominations & Screenings


68th Venice International Film Festival:  Orizzonti Competition

CPH:DOX Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival (Official Selection & Laurel)
London Film Festival: New British Cinema Selection (Official Selection & Laurel)
Rotterdam International Film Festival  (Official Selection & Laurel)
New Horizons Film Festival (Official Selection & Laurel)
Melbourne International Film Festival (Special Screening & Gallery Installation)
London Institute of Psychoanalysis (Special Event: The Neuro-Image)
NYC Institute of Psychoanalysis (Special Event: The Neuro-Image)
EYE Cinema (Special Neuro-Image Presentation Screening)
Calgary International Film Festival (Official Selection & Laurel)         
Brighton Film Festival Cinema of the Mind
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
New Zealand International Film Festival
Cinema du Réel - 37e édition - Centre George Pompidou

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The ongoing series of works ANIMATE BODIES & MECHANICAL MINDS creates a science-fiction world of human bodies ruled over by Writing Down Machines.

These Writing Down Machines have become characters in a series of works that set the digitally animated machines - personifications of the active nature of both our languages and technologies - against human figures and characters.

The Writing Down Machines were first developed in response to the writings of the well known c19th psychotic writer Daniel Paul Schreber. Their design is inspired by the Malling Hansen Writing Ball: the first commercially produced typewriter was invented in 1865 by the reverend Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835–1890) principal of the Royal Institute for the Deaf-Mutes in Copenhagen.

Meat & Magic, flesh and code, analogue and digital: these tensions are enacted in the DNA of the project. Each each work in the series reflects in a different way the uneasy relationship humankind has developed with the flocks of digital data we now live amongst - and the living language machines of artificial intelligence we are spawning. Each work proposes a different story of humankind’s relationship with the languages and technology it has invented: and each story has a different ending.

As the project develops it is referencing a diverse range of techno-romantic writers and thinkers that have so far included Mary Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Daniel Paul Schreber, Sigmund Freud and William Burroughs. 

Drawing is a form of magic that turns human gestures into traces and marks, building up moments of observation over time to create an image that is more about structure and depth than it is about surface. Anatomical Drawing takes this breaking of the difference between inside and outside to extremes.

Animation can take such drawings – historically associated with death – and bring them to life. Such drawings become a trace of human physicality and analogue matter within ebbs and flows of digital data.

Many of the figures in ANIMATE BODIES & MECHANICAL MINDS are created from a combination of traditional pigments (such as graphite, lamp black, bone black and even human blood) derived from both earth and body. Then this matter is modified, re-ordered, distorted and given borrowed life by either animation algorithms or the more directly by the motion-captured gestures of performers. In the digital ‘re-animation’ of drawings and scanned skeletons I work closely with Barend Onneweer at Raamw3rk Post Production.

To build characters in this way allows me to speak about feelings and experiences that are profoundly different from conventional cinema: to speak of characters that are fragile and provisional in their construction, even their interiors exposed, as we ourselves often feel in the maelstrom of data and communications we have built around and inside ourselves.