Big Screen Associate Programme: Louise Ashcroft, Nacoca Ko, Basim Magdy

A programme of artists' moving image shown on Big Screen Southend, the outdoor screen beside Focal Point Gallery, to accompany the gallery's group exhibition Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: rest in a networked world, which explores the effect of networked media on our collective mental wellbeing.

Works by Louise Ashcroft, Nacoca Ko and Basim Magdy look at how digital technologies are reshaping human relationships, identities and experiences of connection, from the intimate and emotional to the social and political.

The works play one after another, on rotation, on Big Screen Southend, the large public screen outdoors in Elmer Square, right outside Focal Point Gallery. There is nothing to book: visitors can stand in the square and watch at any time during screening hours.

The works:

Louise Ashcroft, Ben Target and Hannah Taylor, Real Stupidity: Sue Donim (2025), 1 min 11 sec. One of a series of spoof advertisements for imaginary AI inventions, made with comedians, that take on questions about bias, authorship and ecology in AI.

Basim Magdy, New Acid (2019), 14 min 18 sec. Animals chat by text message, and between their mundane exchanges, rivalry, insecurity and questions of self-love and nationalism surface, until a group of censored ring-tailed lemurs make their escape.

Louise Ashcroft, Frankie Thompson and Hannah Taylor, Real Stupidity: Coming of AIge (2025), 4 min 20 sec.

Nacoca Ko, Parasocial Social Club (2026), 5 min 7 sec. A journey through an AI-generated world about the intimacy, desire and care people project onto images, technologies and artificial beings that will never know them in return.

Louise Ashcroft, Ella Golt and Hannah Taylor, Real Stupidity: Shadow Hands (2025), 4 min 1 sec.