Krumville \\ Dian Joy

Krumville is a multi-screen film exploring memory, perception, and mediated experience through a fictional town created from remixing algorithmic image-making and personal recollections.

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Rather than a single overarching storyline, the work presents a day-in-the-life of Krumville through repetitions, echoes, and interrelations where characters, motifs, and scenes reappear across five synced chapters. Using social media images and lived experience as blueprints, Krumville explores how networked cognition reshapes digital culture into an emergent narrative-building machine. These uncanny images are then restaged with filmed performances in real locations, forming a recursive loop where memory becomes data, image, and performance.

Presented within a phantom shopping centre space, where dormant escalators stand as remnants of a future that never arrived at the back of Barnsley Civic, Krumville unfolds across five ambiguous environments: a factory grounded in labour-intensive metaphor; a high street populated by synchronised figures and quiet absurdities; a theatre occupied by a lone pacing dog and distant disembodied voices; a diner suspended in a loop of stalled action; and an underpass where isolated characters appear tenuously connected across space. Influenced by cinematic and televisual language, AI image generation, and online visual culture, the work constructs a world that feels both hyper-specific and strangely universal.

 

Krumville by Dian Joy is commissioned and produced by Abandon Normal Devices (AND) for AND Festival 2026 with development and touring support from Wigan Council and Barnsley Civic. Supported using public funding through the National Lottery by Arts Council England. With additional support through Immersive Arts – Experiment grant awarded to the artist.

What to expect

Entrance to Krumville is free but booking is encouraged to guarantee entry at your preferred hour slot. In the event that you turn up without a ticket there may be a small number of walk up spots available, or a chance to book at a later time.
Krumville is a multi screen installation that is 20 minutes long and cycles 3 times across the hour. It takes place in a disused escalator space at the back of Barnsley Civic.

Access provisions

  • There is no narrative speech in Krumville, but there will be some incidental and ambient sounds.
  • You can collect ear plugs and large print copies of the interpretation information about the artwork from the gallery space if you need them.
  • There is no permanent seating in the elevator space but there will be borrowable seating options on offer.
  • There will be a relaxed time slot each day for Krumville. There will be fewer people in the space at these times. More information and tickets for these slots will be available by mid August.

Krumville is a new commission and therefore currently in development. We aim to have additional access information available here from mid August. Additional access information on the venue can be found on our Access Information page. 

Age Guidance

We recommend the minimum age for this installation is 12+. It features 5 synced projections depicting fictional characters within Northern landscapes with themes and content more suitable for older children.