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Corey Hughes

Animation / Video / Film, Visual / Media

My work documents how individuals use cameras and technology to understand themselves in relation to the environments around them. Employing a collaged approach of image making techniques my practice expands the definition of the cinematic image to represent the complexity and contractions of our current moment. Creating images that reflect the feeling of living in an increasingly hybridized world mediated by technologies we don’t fully understand or control.

About the Artist

Corey Hughes (b. 1992) is a Baltimore based director and cinematographer whose work exists in between narrative, documentary, and experimental forms. His work has premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam, SXSW, New York Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, and Locarno Film Festival, where he was awarded the Pardi di Domani Special Jury Prize for the short film "Armageddon 2." As a cinematographer, his credits include Theo Anthony’s "All Light, Everywhere" (Sundance Jury Award for Nonfiction Experimentation '21) & "Subject to Review" (NYFF '19, ESPN+) as well as Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s "Hi, I Need to Be Loved," "Dirt Daughter," & "Crestone" (True/False & SXSW '20). He graduated with a B.F.A. in Film & Video Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has participated in international workshops and residencies including the Black Factory Cinema/EICTV 2017 Cuba Workshop, Berlinale Talents 2022, Robert W. Deutsch 2018 Baltimore Artist Retreat, and a 2021 MacDowell Fellowship. His work has been featured by Adult Swim, Criterion Channel, The Eyeslicer, DEEP, The Fader, No Budge, Kinoscope, and in galleries including Macao Milano, That That Gallery, and Blum & Poe (Los Angeles).  

Corey Hughes website Work

Artist's Statement

My work documents how individuals use cameras and technology to understand themselves in relation to the environments around them. Employing a collaged approach of image-making techniques my practice expands the definition of the cinematic image to represent the complexity and contractions of our current moment. Creating images that reflect the feeling of living in an increasingly hybridized world mediated by technologies we don’t fully understand or control. My films utilize humor, beauty, and surrealism as a gateway to explore deeper issues of spirituality, masculinity, hyper-consumerism, and surveillance. Creating narratives to process the past, interrogate the present, and envision new futures.

Featured Work

Photos

Film still from the production of Armageddon 2. Michel, a local Judo instructor, wearing a prop necklace custom made for the film using found materials and locally sourced e-waste. The USB necklace holds illegally torrented movies, television, and images.
Installed next to a popular bike trail and behind the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. A modified motion-activated trail camera, used primarily for hunters to track prey, is reimagined to capture a fictionalized meeting between two seemingly benign creatures: an escaped penguin and a levitating cyclist. Using a combination of video and 3D animation a looping video plays on a custom-made rock screen floating in the air alongside fake rock sculptures and a bluetooth speaker playing an audio track of the Brood X Cicada mating call. Using horror movie visual tropes and physical humor the piece explores how surveillance disguises itself in plain sight and the user's complicated participation in the act of seeing and being seen.
Film still from "Your Final Meditation" currently in post-production. “Your Final Meditation,” is a long form guided meditation structured as a series of video game levels. In this level, a knight character embarks on the impossible task of 3D scanning an entire forest. Filmed with a steadicam we sought to create hyper smooth images that look and feel like a 3rd person point of view in a video game. Combining live action footage, 3D scans, and digital animations this scene moves between the character documenting the world and the scans they are creating. As large tech companies seek to recreate the “real” world in the metaverse, what is lost in the process? After encountering a strange object in the forest the knight must face his imminent demise. The forest does not want to be scanned.
Film still from “My Expanded View,” showing a drone operator being filmed by a thermal imaging camera. Employing a collaged approach of image making techniques my practice seeks to expand the definition of the cinematic image. Combining both high and low resolution imagery. Traditional cinematic tools and consumer products. Creating images that reflect the feeling of living in an increasingly hybridized world mediated by technologies we don’t fully understand or control. For this film, I used a surveillance camera, cinema camera, GoPro’s, consumer drone, robotic gimbal, and a thermal imaging camera to create a chaotic cinematographic landscape that counters the soothing voiceover of the yoga instructor.
Film still from the production of “My Expanded View,” showing a distracted film crew and a yoga instructor stuck in a pose. This film was written during a period where I was working as a camera operator on reality TV shows. I found that when working on those sets I was way more interested in the dynamics going on behind the camera than by what was being filmed. I wanted to create a film that showed the collapse of the film set structure and blurred the line between who is filming and who is being filmed.
“Your Final Meditation,” cuts between 12 levels of a fictional video game and the player of the game, Jodiiie. Jodiiie is quarantined in a cluttered, communal warehouse on the edge of a post-industrial city. She is trying out a new VR guided meditation game called “Your Final Meditation,” in an attempt to calm her pandemic anxieties. Jodiiie becomes increasingly consumed by the game as the meditation descends into a maze of real, virtual, and hybrid worlds. The film's collaged approach includes scripted live action scenes, 3D animation, body-mounted camera performances, AI-generated images, macro nature documentation, and video game screen captures to build a hyper-real world that reflects our current moment in all its humor and horror.

Videos

  • Armageddon 2

    See more information about Armageddon 2
    The internet in Cuba is very slow. Movies, television, and information are exchanged through a black market system of media distribution via external hard drives known as “el paquete semanal.” Shot over the course of a day in the town of San Antonio de los Baños, the film combines narrative, documentary, and experimental elements to create, like the paquete itself, new images and new connections between distant and unseen forces. A meditation on the flow of data and the search for human connection in a groundless world. Produced during Black Factory Cinema's Filmmaking in Cuba workshop taught by Werner Herzog.
    Medium: Digital Video
    Year: 2017
    Details: 5 min.

  • My Expanded View

    See more information about My Expanded View
    A YouTube Yoga tutorial. A collapsed body. An expanded view. "My Expanded View" uses the format of a YouTube yoga tutorial and its collapse as a basis for exploration of new age spirituality, domestic surveillance, and camera technologies. How do we document the body and who is doing the documenting?

    "[My Expanded View] should be labelled as a tutorial on shooting in the age of digital cinema. Hughes delivers a masterclass on using tools such as drones, iPads, Osmo cameras, and thermal cameras, to expand our views on how images can be created today." - Stefan Ivančić, Locarno Film Festival
    Medium: Digital Video
    Year: 2018
    Details: 8 min.

  • Chiffon “Woke Me”

    See more information about Chiffon “Woke Me”
    Music video for the track "Woke Me" by Baltimore band Chiffon. “Woke Me” re-creates the feeling of wandering through a party late at night. A celebration of the dancers, performers, artists, and musicians in Baltimore and the collaborative creative energy of the city. Filmed at the artist-run space The Compound.

    "The Corey Hughes-directed visual for “Woke Me” is like a dream state event set in an opulent ballroom of enchantment. Captured and curated before the lockdown; the audience is invited to join some of Baltimore’s best and brightest stars. The video feels like entering a vision world of an alternate and inclusive new realities of togetherness and camaraderie" - Week in Pop
    Medium: Digital Video
    Year: 2020
    Details: 4 min.

  • MyToeShoes.Com

    See more information about MyToeShoes.Com
    A Florida man (known only by his YouTube username: DeerPro42) records an unboxing video for Vibram Five Finger Toe Shoes. After a vision from a mysterious CGI camera operator, he travels to the Florida keys by hoverboard. As his unboxing video continues his attention shifts from the product to himself. A crisis on the beach. An eye in the sky. The unboxer unboxed.

    "MyToeShoes.Com" is the second film in a series that focuses on popular YouTube genres as creation sites for new types of performative avatars. Filmed with a variety of different cameras (aerial drone, head mounted GoPro's, 360 camera on selfie stick, screen recordings, CGI, cinema camera), the film explores a world in which each person is both watching and being watched, filming and being filmed. The project was filmed by a three person cast/crew over the course of a week travelling from Miami to the Florida Keys in a minivan.

    "In Hughes imagination, the drab format becomes a macrocosmic journey documented with GoPros, 360 degree cameras, Google Maps views and beyond. As the unboxer tests out his new toe shoes with regard to comfortability, water resistance, and speed, he’s led into the unknown by a mysterious automated voice. Hughes has established himself as one of our preeminent experimental filmmakers" -NoBudge

    Medium: Digital Video
    Year: 2019
    Details: 8 min.

  • Abdu Ali "Did Dat"

    See more information about Abdu Ali "Did Dat"
    Credits: Cinematography, Editing, & Co-Directed by Corey Hughes. Co-Directed by Abdu Ali & Corey Hughes. Drone Operator: Travis Levasseur.

    Project Info: Visuals for "Did Dat," a track off of Baltimore-based performer Abdu Ali's 2016 Album MONGO. Filmed at the former artist-run space THE BELL FOUNDRY in Baltimore, Maryland. "Did Dat" premiered online via THE FADER.
    Medium: Digital Video
    Year: 2017
    Details: 4 min.

  • "Your Final Meditation: Level IX" *Work in Progress

    See more information about "Your Final Meditation: Level IX" *Work in Progress
    You are a bug. You are born. You live. You die.

    A guided meditation from the perspective of a cicada. Level IX of a fictional video game titled: “Your Final Meditation.”

    A Baltimore backyard in the Summer of 2021. Thousands of Brood X Cicadas emerge after 17 years underground. An AI voiceover guides the viewer through the final days of the bugs as the nymphs emerge from the ground, molt, mate, and die. Using the life cycle of the Brood X Cicadas to explore new models of identity, mindfulness, and self-transformation in an era of global isolation and adaptation.

    Filmed with vintage 16mm probe lenses designed for extremely close photography and working with a commercial production crew, the film echoes the visual aesthetics of nature documentaries like “Planet Earth” & “Microcosmos” while subverting the traditional treatment in favor of a more psychedelic new age approach echoing Croenberg’s “eXistenZ” and Marker’s “Level Five.”

    Sound design recorded in collaboration with avant garde Berlin based composer Max Eilbacher using speciality microphones designed for recording extremely close sounds and vibrations inaudible to the human ear.

    This film is a part of a larger series set inside the fictional guided meditation VR video game: “Your Final Meditation.” The project, presented as a series of 12 levels, explores the body’s relationship to the camera, our virtual selves, and the metaverse.
    Medium: Digital Video
    Year: 2023
    Details: 10 mins.