Lucy Ellis is an experimental animator and creative coder based in London. Her work explores the digital and analogue through experimenting with process and materiality. She enjoys working with scrap and found materials repurposing them to form new identities and narratives differing from their original purpose or intention. The texture of materials is important to her practice, exploring how it evokes memory and time. More recently she has become interested in screen based installation work exploring animation as an expanded practice.
She was awarded as the inaugural winner of the DAZED and Rabanne arts factory 2024 where she displayed her work at Miami Art Basel 2024. She has also displayed work in festivals like the London Short Film Festival, Peckham Digital’s Festival of Creative Computing and been featured in Labocine’s Primary Colours Issue 2025. She recently was selected for Arebyte’s Hotel Generation 2025.
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04 PIXELA-ZZZ
2024
Displayed at Peckham Digitals Festival of Creative Computing
Displayed at Dream Sequence SET Social Peckham
Displayed at Art Basel Miami 2024
Featured in Labocine Primary Colours Issue 2025
Through experimenting with the processes of datamoshing and databending I became obsessed with the way data melted and how the digital frames perfect formulation of pixels could be broken and distorted. The frequent output of glitching experiments and the continuous blue light in my eyes enhanced my sleep deprivation, myopia and feeling of disconnection in crowded places.
Lev Manovich discusses the sampling of data “at regular intervals such as the grid of pixels used to represent a digital image”. The digital frame is not an image but a representation and simulation of an image. Considering this, when we force distortion to this wall of pixels error is introduced altering our perception of the image. As Michael Betancourt puts it, a “colourful bath of pixels” is released.
Therefore, PIXELA-ZZZ presents an almost digital daydream where the mundane act of walking becomes a colourful soup of distortion. As the figures move closer towards us, the camera pans further away. There is a theme of disconnection between the viewer and the figures where we try to understand the figures, but they break form and become unclear in the process. The film also utilises a VHS transfer process adding grain and colour distortion to the figures.
VHS transfer process!