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.

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.

CAST

Angel Okolo – Looking 1
Amelya Goldy – Waving
Arno Verano – Driving
Bianca Scout – Crying
Boe Rogers – Sweeping
Jago & Hayley Harvey – Ranging
Lucy Aley-Parker – Judging
Mariia Isai – Waiting
Maya Tetteh – Looking 3
Mirony Mujinga – Looking 2
Robert G Slade – Searching
Shammi Aulakh – Pushing

CREW

Dian Joy — Director
Emilia Clark — Producer
Alex Mill — 1st Assistant Director
Klein Delacroix — Casting Director

Benjo Leggett — Director of Photography
Olivia Prendergast — 1st Assistant Camera
Orrin Saint Pierre — Camera Trainee

Belle Palmano — Gaffer
Stephen Allwright — Spark

Delia Detritus — Custom Props

Ana Pereira — Costume Designer
Nicola Morgan — Costume Assistant
Jenny Glynn — Hair & Makeup Designer

Feryel Kaabeche — Artist’s Assistant
Sophie Hayter — Production Assistant

Adam Muscat & Dian Joy — Editors
James White & Dian Joy — VFX
Justin Drew — Picture Grader

Charlie Morris — Head of Colour Production

Sarah Banks — Colour Producer
Cajm — Sound