SERVER \\ Screenings Programme
SERVER will be playing at Barnsley Civic and online over the festival weekend. You can enjoy the stream here from 10.30am on 25 September.
FILM SCREENINGS
Chris MacInnes
Impotent Island
This is an excerpt from an installation by the same title. The film is narrated by a cartoon face, spray-painted onto an abandoned foundry building on Sheffield’s Brightside Lane. The face recounts the childhood experiences of a boy growing up in post-industrial South Yorkshire at the turn of the millennium. Oscillating between local anecdotes, global connections and cosmic trajectories it attempts to articulate the sense of loss and collapsed time often found in cities such as Sheffield long after the money has left.
Gweni Llwyd
Red Vein / Faengoch
Red Vein transforms the slate-scarred landscapes of North Wales into a rhythmic exploration of resilience, memory, and imagination. Rooted in Dyffryn Nantlle – a rural Welsh-speaking valley shaped by centuries of slate extraction – the work reimagines quarries not just as sites of labour and loss, but as places of potential, creativity, and collective transformation.
Weaving together archival fragments, personal memory, and Welsh-language oral histories, Red Vein layers images and sounds of industrial labour, hand-drawn rave maps, photographic archives, and hazy recollections, to explore how histories – both inherited and lived – are carried through the body, the land, and the collective imagination.
Nina Davies
Never let them know your next move
Never Let Them Know Your Next Move (2022), takes the form of a podcast interview where host and guest discuss recent developments in human/computer relations. This conversation is set in a fictional near future, in a society that while not yet entirely post-work, understanding of what constitutes labour and work is becoming increasingly ambiguous. Davies extrapolates current concerns about the gig economy and surveillance capitalism into a possible future system of work and governance that commodifies human movement and ultimately supersedes human language.
Sel Maclean
COAL
Coal is a short film weaving contemporary dance and archival imagery to explore coal extraction in the North East. Blending motion and memory, it reflects on the region’s identity, rooted in the physicality of labour and its deep connection to the land.
Silvia Dal Dosso
The Future Is Now Finally Weird AF (The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) – Part Three
Welcome to the post-post-post-truth AI world. You know it’s not real. But you will suffer the bare consequences of it anyway. And there is more out there. Clueless CEOs and their humanoid robots await you at the door.
We live in a time of great ambiguity and confusion. Events keep happening that seem unreal and out of control. By design. Hyper-flexible humanoid robots are getting ready to cook our eggs. Tesla cars are exploding everywhere. LLMs are unleashed on social media to generate synthetic data and consensus. Tech overlords are going all in on AGI, using war as their open-air R&D studio. Millionaires are dancing and planning long-term, while the rest of humankind is trapped in a world reality where meaning is constantly set aside just to make it through the next post.
All around them, the world is burning. While watching the decay of the internet with a cool detachment, only one thing remains certain: “AI agents are among us, and the future is now finally weird as fuck.”
The short film, third of a trilogy, is inspired by the work of Adam Curtis and actually introduced by his synthetic voice. The trilogy explores the emotional, cultural, and aesthetic implications of the massive use of generative artificial intelligence. Like Adam Curtis’s original documentary series, the movie is a compilation of found footage, collected from the endless source of news and oddities that the internet still is.
Total Refusal
Hardly Working
Hardly Working sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.
ZULI / Chepertom
Hapi Tomorrow
Hapi Tomorrow is an audio-visual work mapping a landscape where the birth and death of human civilisation ripple across the computer screen. Taking the Nile Delta in Egypt as its source, the work questions a movement from the fertile ‘cradle of civilisation’ towards a future shaped by climate change and vulnerable water levels.
Dionisio González
Extract from La revuelta y la nieve (The Revolt and the Snow)
La revuelta y la nieve takes Asturian underground as its starting point: a place where geological and symbolic dimensions converge, where seams of coal, labour and collective memory lie compressed together. Dionisio González descends into those layers to propose a journey in three chapters: one that excavates the mining past, envisions an architecture that never was, and peers into the digital future already taking root in the abandoned galleries
GAMES
Atomfall
Atomfall is a survival-action game inspired by real-life events and set five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England. Exploring the fictional quarantine zone, players scavenge, craft, barter, fight and talk their way through a British countryside setting filled with bizarre characters, mysticism, cults, and rogue government agencies.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a 2024 comedy adventure game created by Coal Supper (Will Todd and James Carbutt), who hail from Barnsley, Yorkshire. The game is set in the fictional town of Barnsworth in the North of England, where the player controls an unnamed, yellow, very small salesman as they explore the town and help the inhabitants with their problems.
Brownie’s Adventure: The Final Resolution
An incompetent wizard is tasked with stopping a recently awakened evil entity that just so happens to be trapped inside a (deeply suspiciously heavy) spoon. What follows is a sprawling, absurd 1990s-style point-and-click comedy adventure across bizarre fantasy realms and also North Derbyshire.
SERVER is a continuous, 7-hour, artist-led festival film channel creating space for critical reflection, speculative storytelling and interdisciplinary exchange.
SERVER is commissioned and produced by Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and Going Away.tv for AND Festival 2026. Supported using public funding through the National Lottery by Arts Council England, with further support from Barnsley Council and Barnsley Civic.
How to experience SERVER
SERVER takes place in the gallery space in Barnsley Civic. It is free to attend and drop in, no prior booking is needed.
It is a continuous, 7-hour screening of artist talks, keynote presentations, in-conversations, film screenings and digital game playthroughs. We will provide schedules if you’d like to catch a specific section of the programme. You can spend as much or little time as you want in the space. The experience may be more suitable for ages 12+ due to the themes of the programme.
If the space is full when you arrive, you might have to wait a short time before a seat becomes available.
Access Provisions
- AND aims to caption all SERVER content, we aim to have additional access information available here from mid August.
- There will be a mixture of seating options, including some with arms and backs.
SERVER is a new work 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 artists, academics and creative practitioners talking through artworks, artistic practices and themes of the festival. Some content may contain strong language and images of a sexual nature, violence, and body horror, which is suitable for ages 16+. Sections with this content will be clearly labelled on the programme schedule.