Phoenix Fry

Playground (work-in-progress)

A large-scale digital film project that reinterprets Pieter Bruegel’s 1560 painting ‘Children’s Games’ as a contemporary moving image.

Using AI to erase background detail, the film brings together multiple clips of children at play and assembles them into a single space.

It captures the ways children occupy and invent space through movement, games, swings & slides, toys, TikTok trends and imaginary worlds.

The resulting film(s) will be large-scale tableaux that invite viewers to scan, follow and return to different parts of the image. It is a game (‘Can you find the girls spinning around!’), a social document (cf, Steve McQueen’s Year 3 and LS Lowry’s The Playground) and a shimmering constellation of shapes in motion.

Test video 1

Test video 2

Pieter Bruegel: Children’s Games (1560)

LS Lowry: Children Playing (1945)