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.
bird5.art
CV
02 SLOOOG
2024
Three Nokia 5110 Screen installation using Raspberry Pi and Python
Displayed at CSM Open Studios 2024SLOOOG is a three-screen installation using the obsolete Nokia 5110 phone screen. The work displays an animation interacting the screens together exploring an expanded animation practice.
Lev Manovich discusses how “the screen is rapidly becoming the main means of accessing any kind of information”. The screen “exists in our normal space, the space of our body, and acts as a window into another space”. We could argue that the screen is the mediator between the viewer and virtual space. In this instance, the Nokia 5110 screen is the mediator into a space which is restrictive and nostalgic (to times where technology was less developed) to the viewer.
From a process point of view, the Nokia 5110 screen utilises binary forms and a small canvas size, things which are harder to manipulate in contrast to 4k crisp digital forms. In the process of wiring this over ten screens were purchased seven of which broke exploring obsolete digital material in a technologically accelerating society. This raises questions around production vs consumption and the marginalisation of screen aesthetics.