UMA Projects

For information about UMA Projects please contact joint convenors of United Media Artists Terry Flaxton or Will Pappenehimer - Or for UMA England:  Terry Flaxton 

​For some long time now first analogue methods and latterly digital methods of generating moving images have challenged fine art in a very specific kind of way that every artist will have to answer for themselves. Duchamp articulated a fundamental question in art: Is it the concept or the object that is the point of art? When digital media succeeded analogue media to make moving images, the proximity of analogue materials held a connection with the object.
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Originally celluloid proceeded in dental advances to then become the ‘film’ upon which a series of images could be recorded and then played back using sewing machine technology. Along came John Logie Baird and many other innovators who encoded images in an electronic form utilising analogue methods – later to be succeeded by data becoming the dominant form of recording and playback – which in itself enabled coders to then interfere with a simple flow of images – and in so doing enabled more immersive techniques.​

Practitioners of Art within an Evolving Technological Landscape

***News "Wilderness" will be featured for six months during the 2026 Venice Biennale from 9th May until 29th November in the European Cultural Centre at the Palazzo Mora on Strada Nova in Cannaregio, Venice, Italy.
8 UMA Artists involved: Tamiko Thiel, Nataša Prosenc Stearns, John Sanborn, James Bloom, Will Pappenheimer, Fernanda D'Agostino, Terry Flaxton, Nina Sobell, 

***News ​"UMA REVEAL" will be featured during three two week exhibitions in May, June and July, 2026 Biennale in Venice during the Venice Biennale
​Artists  currently involved: Tamiko Thiel, Nataša Prosenc Stearns, ​Sadia Sadia, Kerry Baldry, Jutta Pryor, Arielko, Nick Fudge, John Sanborn, James Bloom, Will Pappenheimer, Fernanda D'Agostino, Terry Flaxton, Nina Sobell

Artists in newer media had to often situate themselves as Ghosts in the Machine, ghosts that wandered and explored the interstices of opportunity – and for many years they could not sell their work. Now we are in a new age and we can excavate meaning from those interstices and UMA Artists can situate themselves at this threshold. In so doing we explore the multiple meanings of technology as it interacts with art and our projects are designed to relate all of our these new innovations to the basic cause of art – where the artist selflessly throws themselves on the bonfire of exploration, to create both old and new meanings in art, such that the audience does not feel alone.

We intend to create more and very different installations and exhibitions that provoke different methods of display and also can register as small and large versions of the same project.
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UMA Reveal
United Media Artists have our 1st group exhibition where two screens of UMA Artists works will exhibit at the Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello during the 2026 Venice Biennale in continuous rotation. There will be three, two week exhibitions of our works taking place in May, June and July, where we reveal the panoply of ideas that up to 24 artists with a common purpose have. 
→ go to project page ​

WILDERNESS - The profound relationship of life and the World
Scientists believe that, at the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago, that as soon as life developed after 500 million years, it introduced oxygen and then after another 1.8 billion years of no significant interchange, a chemical development in the oceans allowed oxygen to escape the oceans and then form an atmosphere - such that life itself escaped the oceans and became ‘us’. In the current no-man’s land of our thinking around Deep ecology, an exogram is an artefact in the physical world, where from early times humans have exported knowledge into ‘carriers of meaning’, from arrangements of stone or wood, cuneiform tablets, scrolls, codices, books, and lately computers, where the end state of this revolution is data without form. In his book Origins of the Modern Mind, Professor Merlin Donald argues that in creating exograms, humans have always grasped the meaning of these messages they’ve been compelled to create for eachother - from a neolithic handprint 50,000 years ago to ascending ‘Voyager’ into interstellar space  - and so now,  in discovering UMA’s messages, an audience member may dream of a future for a better world.
→ go to project page

Pictures at an Exhibition – 12 durational artworks
In his story ‘The Mirror Maker’, Primo Levi has his protagonist fall in love and try to speak about his love through making a mirror, “the metamir” (a metaphysical mirror) which will reveal his feelings for his loved one, directly on a mirror of his feelings which he carries with him at all times. UMA artists will reveal their questions and their answers through 12 Metamirs – 12 metaphysical mirrors – 12 durational paintings – 12 abstract works – 12 intensely slow works to interrogate the nature of painting and of art itself.
→ go to project page 

12 Portals to other Worlds – A Garden of unearthly delights
In the near darkness the audience will first hear the eerie sound of wind blowing, intermingled with synthetic voices in a choral composition which evokes the sense of deep space. Turning the corner the audience then come upon a waist high 9 foot (3m) square installation – with a barren covering of dirt and rock, with 12 frames in both landscape and portrait mode, upon which images of other worlds are portrayed. The frames are self-illuminated with new forms of planetary surfaces and the audience will be free to quietly contemplate our relationship to universal themes.
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The Tower of Babel – A Tower of Light
Audiences will come upon a 200cms high triangular installation – similar to a tree in shape – scattered with 12 frames with images on the frames of heightened and concentrated media forms – facing in all directions. The Tower of Babel brings the problem of contemporary social media and its effects on the citizen centrally into ‘a broadcasting tower’ of pain and unease on one level – so for a time it provides a cacophonic soundscape – and then switches into a mode of calm. These periods speed up until eventually they both occur at the same time – the metaphors of Pain and Salvation until everything stops in a darker quieter period (all of this the metaphor for the big bang and what follows universally into the heat death of the universe) until the whole 60 minute exposition that the tower represents occurs once more.
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Transition: Moving From A to B (A trans religious act)
The most ubiquitous artwork in Christian Churches of many Denominations charts the passage of The Christ from being condemned to death to crucifixion - in an extend version the 15 is introduced: Resurrection.....  For UMA artists this will be about transition from one condition to another - and that's what artists can interpret - and in UMA's case our group can offer up our own version - plus, we will evolve this idea into a non denominational form such that this work in 15 parts can travel to holy place and humanitarian places as a trans religious act.
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River Deltas
River Deltas are the meeting place between clear water and salt water - an often fertile, triangular-shaped landform created at a river's mouth where it slows down and deposits its sediment (sand, silt, clay) as it enters a larger, calmer body of water like an ocean, lake, or sea, forming new land with branching channels called distributaries. These nutrient-rich areas are vital for ecosystems, agriculture, and coastal protection, with famous examples including the Nile and Mississippi Deltas. RIver Deltas therefor offer UMA Artists a metaphor to use both visually and also conceptually. Necessarily we have to examine what metaphors come from these mixes, just as we may consider large areas of very saline water like the Sargasso Sea known for its exceptionally high salinity, warm temperatures, and calm waters, making it a distinct, salty "desert" within the Atlantic Ocean, which also leads us to consider its effects upon literature (with special regard to Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea and how it reflects on Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre) and of course on human agency and its effects on the ecology of the planet.
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​Between Object and Image
This offering from UMA is a set of Digital Frames that take the overall title Between Object and Image where the image floats within a 7 inch lucite frame – This is a series of 12 unique digital creations of video and sound, artefacts created in each artist’s signature style using revolutionary technology – including working with AI, code-based art, as well as new media technologies developed through digital arts history again manifesting our behaviour as Ghosts in the Machine — all of this to explore the range of the human experience; producing captivating and significant media artworks.
→ go to project page

The 2027 International Festival of Media Arts in Wells, UK
The aim of the festival, initiated by United Media Artists, as The 2027 International Festival of Media Arts in Wells UK,i s to bring the best of Digital Art into a 5 day festival using local screening spaces, art galleries and installation spaces in Somerset, UK. Our proposition is that this is a living festival - meaning the artists who show work from all around the world will be present. This festival will be facilitated by United Media Artists. This project will be created in association with an international set of partners from around the world (Sedition Art, Muse Frames, Video Brasil, ZKM etc). The 2027 festival will take place in Somerset in September 2027 with breakout screenings in different UK cities with events broadcast from each, to each. via streaming Platforms.
→ go to project page