Private Project

Memory Foam

Inspired partly by the 7,000 year old neolithic stone monuments in the area of the UK in which I grew up, and partly by the disintegration of our faculties of memory and attention which characterise our contemporary minds, ‘Memory Foam’ presents an anachronistic and absurd imagining of life at an unspecified moment in prehistory. An audiobook narrator jauntily recollects a life full of the hunger, profanity, violence, lust and existential malaise that every human, regardless of the epoch they inhabit, must experience at some time or other; but the experiences she describes are filtered through the distractedness and inability to concentrate that are perhaps features unique to the present moment.

A stereotypical fancy dress “caveman” meanwhile gives meaningful-seeming interviews and fails to sharpen flints, make arrows or start a fire. The editing style is dense and kinetic, referring to the endlessly shifting surfaces that define our increasingly virtual lives, whist the ancient stones themselves sit somewhere in the background, enduring in stillness and silence.

  • Jack Jelfs
    Director
    'Billy Takes a Break', 'The Wave Epoch', 'one1one'
  • Jack Jelfs
    Writer
    'Billy Takes a Break'
  • Jack Jelfs
    Producer
    'Billy Takes a Break'
  • Madeleine Rose
    Key Cast
    "Narrator"
  • Jack Jelfs
    Key Cast
    "Caveman"
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short, Other
  • Genres:
    Art
  • Runtime:
    19 minutes 34 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    June 11, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    2,000 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Exeter Contemporary Open
    Exeter
    United Kingdom
    September 14, 2023
    world premiere
Director Biography - Jack Jelfs

Jack Jelfs is a London-based artist, filmmaker and musician. His artistic practice is frequently concerned with questions relating to time, consciousness and ontology, with the ultimate aim of discovering new features of the human experience. His work has included films in which reality and fiction overlap, sound installations and new types of musical instruments, DIY electrical circuits for producing and manipulating video signals, CGI and stop-motion animations, written texts, and performances which combine some or all of these elements. He has exhibited and performed at venues including Tate Modern, Barbican, Serpentine Gallery, Roundhouse, Lisson Gallery and 180 The Strand (all in London) as well as FACT (Liverpool), the Brighton Festival, CCCB (Barcelona), iMal (Brussels), Max Goelitz Gallery (Munich), Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn) and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung).

In 2017, he and the artist Haroon Mirza were joint winners of the COLLIDE international award, a two month residency at CERN in Geneva, and in 2021 they released their debut album ‘The Wave Epoch’. He and Mirza also run OUTPUTS, a record label and platform for collaborations between the worlds of music and fine art. Much of his practice is collaborative; previous collaborators include the composers Shiva Fehareki and Jo Thomas, artist / musician GAIKA and the fashion designer Osman Yousefzada. His latest project is Swimming Pools of The World, a performance persona for live and recorded music. He holds a diploma in art and design from Cheltenham and Gloucester College, a BA in philosophy and English literature from the University of Liverpool and an MSCi in theoretical physics from Imperial College London.

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