A London-based digital artist and photographer, Peter Knight has been honing his skills in multimedia for over 25 years.
Inspired by the freedom and speed of digital photography, but wanting to make something object-based, the Polaroid process satisfied this objective, plus much more.
Drawn to natural and urban landscapes, the photographing of architecture encompasses history, human endeavour and achievement. Quite often the pictures are devoid of people but the architecture speaks of a human presence. Polaroids have a timeless quality – nuances of a historical photographic process which allows the subject to be looked at minus the trappings and association of a particular point in history, which can enhance one’s focus on the actual content.
More recently, Peter has combined and expanded upon the aesthetic of analogue photography and moving image skills first utilised in commercial animation (working on groundbreaking pop promos such as Tom Tom Club’s Wordy Rappinghood) to create unique magical digital landscapes for artists like People Like Us (Vicki Bennett) and Shona Illingworth.
Peter’s first major collaboration with Vicki Bennett was in 2013, animating two short films for Animate Projects and Channel 4 TV’s Random Acts: The Golem – An Inanimate Matter and We Are Not Amused.
In 2014, Peter animated Shona Illingworth’s short film 216 Westbound. He collaborated in 2015 with electronic duo Matmos and Vicki Bennett to produce a video for Ultimate Care II Excerpt Five on Thrill Jockey Records.
Since 2016, Peter has been working on Gone, Gone Beyond (with artist Vicki Bennett), extending and expanding his experience into the world of immersive environments and real-space 360 cinema. Gone, Gone Beyond challenges the boundaries of what cinema can be as an expanded audience experience. This piece toured the UK (SPILL Festival, Brighton Attenborough Centre and Barbican) in Autumn 2021, then currently screened at Gray Area, San Francisco in Summer 2022.
Peter also was recently published in Polaroid Now: The History and Future of Polaroid Photography, a landmark book celebrating Polaroid artists from around the world.
