The BOM Residents are an ever-evolving community of creative practitioners whose practice aligns with our mission to bring positive social impact to the intersection of art, technology and science. Their involvement with us often brings fresh ideas and energy to BOM’s projects and in return they have access to tailored development sessions with our Director and our Head of BOM’s Immersive Studio. We support them to develop new proposals and professional relationships. We’re here to help with funding applications, or progressing Access to Work applications for disabled practitioners, and we provide critical curatorial feedback, access to WEBworks autistic consultancy company and will promote our Residents as far and as widely as we can.
If you ever find yourself at BOM you may well come across residents using the building in a wide range of ways, it could be for everyday meetings and work sessions, or for performance rehearsals, maybe filming stop motion animation or testing new digital works in development.
Today we’d like you to meet our five new Residents, each with work that excites us and who we will be supporting as they realise new projects and expand their practice. Click on their names for links to the artist’s websites.
We wanted Anna to join us on the BOM Residents programme after being captivated by her compelling imagery and the high production values of her accessible work centred on, and expanding out of her lived experience with chronic illness.
Anna uses computational software to explore the sensual possibilities of embodiment in the otherworld of cyberspace. Drawing on her experience of chronic illness, she devises methods that make the resistance of unhelpful systems in online spaces possible.
She is currently finishing her practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art, in which she’s developing rhythmically structured, dynamic video works using digital rendering, video editing, and music production software.
Emma Morgan-Bennett is a native New Yorker currently living in London on a Marshall Scholarship. She embarked on a career as a director after her undergraduate studies in anthropology and became convinced that public health institutions could use visual mediums to develop more effective interventions in addressing health disparities.
She makes documentaries that address race, reproduction, and apocalypse, via both nonfictional and fictionalnarratives.
Emma has received two MAs in Documentary Filmmaking and Digital Media at Goldsmiths University.
We met the filmmaker when she was selected as a youth juror for the 2022 Sheffield DocFest and were in awe of her focus and output. Emma is also a trained doula and has so far assisted five mothers through their pregnancies and births, which is not a necessary prerequisite for a BOM Residency, but we couldn’t be prouder to have her, and her prodigious skill set with us, just to see what she does next.
Jameisha Prescod FRSA is an artist-filmmaker and chronic illness/disability activist based in London.
They are currently exploring experimental work that combines documentary storytelling, film and machine learning with the intention to deepen our perspectives on the way social and cultural expectations influence the way illnesses and disabilities are experienced.
We first met Jameisha at the 2022 Sheffield DocFest and were soon drawn into their plans for a new project, an immersive installation, with a working title of The Womb Room.
Jameisha is also the founder and creative director of You Look Okay To Me, a fast growing social media based space for people who experience chronic illness.
Ninon Ardisson explores both the visceral and ephemeral effects of simulated environments and has an interest in how memories generated within virtual worlds can be recorded and evaluated, acknowledging the potential for both emotional attachment and alienation within these otherworldly places. The artist’s work looks at the conflicting nature of these experiences and their potential to disrupt reality.
Ninon is currently a course convenor and lecturer on the Objects & Environments in Extended Reality course at the Art Academy’s department for Digital Studies, and a sessional Unreal Engine lecturer on the Immersive Storytelling MA at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Many of you will have met Niya during her residency at BOM earlier this year. A transfeminist artist, working at the crossroads of visual art and performance. She uses video, soundscapes, text, live acts and immersive installations to explore themes related to ecology, posthumanism, (trans)gender politics and equity in health and wellbeing.
Niya sees her work as running counter to the prevailing political forces of division and instead seeks to establish intimacy with her audience, creating a meditative space of vulnerability, affect and interdependence. If you experienced her immersive work 912 at BOM, you’ll know how perfectly she achieved this. So many of us, both trans and cis found ourselves moved by her quiet work that outlined the waiting time required for an appointment at a UK Gender Identity Clinic and the specific trans lived experience of waiting, whilst finding the strength to carry on.
We’re delighted to welcome everyone and curious to see how their projects and ideas progress. Thank you for becoming part of BOM world!