Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham (born 15 October 1970) is a British video artist and music video director who directed music videos for electronic musicians such as Autechre, Squarepusher, and Aphex Twin on videos for "Windowlicker" and "Come to Daddy", and Björk's "All is Full of Love".

All were used in Chris' chapter in Director's Label.

He has also created art installations and directed short movies.

He was approached to direct a movie version of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer; the project has been in development hell for more than two decades.

Between 1990 and 1992, he contributed the occasional cover painting and strip to Judge Dredd Megazine, working under the pseudonym "Chris Halls"; Halls is his stepfather's surname.

After seeing Cunningham's work on the 1995 film version of Judge Dredd, Stanley Kubrick head-hunted Cunningham to design and supervise animatronic tests of the central robot child character in his version of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Cunningham worked for over a year on the film before leaving to pursue a career as a director.

Earlier work in film included model-making, prosthetic make-up and concept illustrations for Hardware and Dust Devil for director Richard Stanley, work on Nightbreed for Clive Barker, and on Alien3 for David Fincher.

Cunningham has had close ties to Warp Records since his first video for Autechre, "Second Bad Vilbel" in 1995 and Squarepusher's "Come On My Selector" in 1998, which received airplay on MTV's Amp and MTV's Chill Out Zone in Europe.

Videos for Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" are perhaps his best known.

His video for Björk's "All Is Full of Love" won multiple awards, including an MTV music video award for Breakthrough Video and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video.

It was also the first ever music video to win a Gold Pencil at the D&AD Awards.

It can still be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

He also directed Madonna's "Frozen" video which became an international hit and won the award for Best Special Effects at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards.

Cunningham also came out of a seven-year hiatus from making music videos to direct the video for "Sheena Is a Parasite" by the Horrors.

In the 2000s, Cunningham began doing music production work, and has also designed album artwork for a variety of musicians.

His video for Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" was nominated for the "Best Video" award at the Brit Awards 2000.

His video installation Flex was first shown in 2000 at the Royal Academy of Arts, and subsequently at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery and other art galleries.

Flex was commissioned by the Anthony d'Offay Gallery for the Apocalypse: Beauty & Horror in Contemporary Art exhibition curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2000.

The Anthony d'Offay Gallery also commissioned Monkey Drummer, a 2½ minute piece intended for exhibition as a companion to Flex at the 2000 Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts: however, the piece was not finished in time.

In it an automaton with nine appendages and the head of a monkey plays the drums to "Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount", the 10th track on Aphex Twin's 2001 album drukqs.

Monkey Drummer debuted as part of Cunningham's installation at the 49th International Exhibition of Art at the 2001 Venice Biennale, which consisted of a loop of Monkey Drummer, Flex, and his video for Björk's "All Is Full of Love".

Rubber Johnny, a six-minute experimental short film cut to a soundtrack by Aphex Twin remixed by Cunningham, was shot between 2001 and 2004.

Shot on DV night-vision, it was made in Cunningham's own time as a home movie of sorts, and took three and half years of weekends to complete.

The Telegraph called it "like a Looney Tunes short for a generation raised on video nasties and rave music".

During this period Cunningham also made another short film for Warp Films, Spectral Musicians, which remains unreleased.

The short film was set to Squarepusher's "My Fucking Sound" from his album Go Plastic; and to a piece called "Mutilation Colony" which was written especially for the short, and was released on the studio album Do You Know Squarepusher.

Cunningham has directed a handful of commercials for companies and brands, including Gucci, Sony (PlayStation), Levi's, Telecom Italia, Nissan, and Orange.

In 2002 both Flex and Monkey Drummer were exhibited by 5th Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, in an exhibition curated by Artist/Curator Paul Murnaghan,

In 2004/2005, Cunningham took a sabbatical from filmmaking to learn about music production and recording and to develop his own music projects.

In 2005, Cunningham released the short film Rubber Johnny as a DVD accompanied by a book of photographs and drawings.

In 2005, Cunningham played a 45-minute audio visual piece performed live in Tokyo and Osaka in front of 30,000+ fans over the two nights at the Japanese electronic music festival.

These performances evolved into Chris Cunningham Live, a 55-minute long performance piece combining original and remixed music and film.

It features remixed, unreleased and brand new videos and music dynamically edited together into a new live piece spread over three screens.

In 2007, an excerpt from Flex was shown in the Barbican's exhibition Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now curated by Martin Kemp, Marina Wallace and Joanne Bernstein.

alongside other pieces by Bacon, Klimt, Rembrandt, Rodin and Picasso.

In December 2007 Cunningham produced two tracks, "Three Decades" and "Primary Colours", for Primary Colours, the second album by the Horrors.

In the summer of 2008, due to scheduling conflicts with his feature film script writing he could not work on the rest of the album which was subsequently recorded by Geoff Barrow from Portishead.

In 2008, he produced and arranged a new version of 'I Feel Love' for the Gucci commercial that he also directed.

He travelled to Nashville to work with Donna Summer to record a brand new vocal for it.