School of Digital Arts - SODA

Members or the Playdemic team recently visited the SODA Games Art and Games Design students for a day dedicated to supporting SODA’s emerging talent. 
 
Students received detailed feedback, portfolio guidance, and valuable industry insights from the team. 
 
It was great to hear from EA Senior Recruiter Pete Johnson, EA Playdemic Designer Joseph Westwell, and EA Playdemic 3D Artist Jean Pierre Vargas Mora, who shared their experiences and advice with the next generation of game developers and artists. 
 
 

Members or the Playdemic team recently visited the SODA Games Art and Games Design students for a day dedicated to supporting SODA’s emerging talent. 
 
Students received detailed feedback, portfolio guidance, and valuable industry insights from the team. 
 
It was great to hear from EA Senior Recruiter Pete Johnson, EA Playdemic Designer Joseph Westwell, and EA Playdemic 3D Artist Jean Pierre Vargas Mora, who shared their experiences and advice with the next generation of game developers and artists. 
 

Viewpoints Photography Festival is currently taking place, bringing together work by students, alumni and staff from the Photography programme at SODA into events and exhibitions happening across Greater Manchester 
 
With student-led pop-up exhibitions in unexpected locations to exhibitions by alumni talks and workshops, explore how photography serves a as a tool for making sense of an ever-changing and complex world. Through themes of place, belonging and perception, these works examine how we orient ourselves within changing social, material and ecological environments. 
 
Find the link in our bio for further information on events, dates and locations. 
 
The festival is Curated by Sophie Lee and Polly Palmerini. 
 

Now screening at Holden Gallery: BODY/LAND by filmmaker and archivist Siân A. Williams, PhD researcher at SODA.

Running 24 April – 7 May, this experimental documentary remixes archival footage with interviews and collaborative performance, supported by .

Featuring rare Super 8 home movies by Oscar-nominated animator Paul Berry, the film captures q***r joy, chosen family and everyday life – reworked with regional archive footage and an original soundtrack by and .

Five featured artists across photography, spoken word, performance, sculpture and music explore identity, history and landscape through q***r and trans perspectives.

Featuring: .night

🕒 Screening on a 90-minute loop 
Monday–Friday 
12:30–14:00 
14:00–15:30 
15:30–17:00 

Additional evening screenings (Mon–Thurs) 
17:30–19:00 

Please note: seating is limited, groups of 5+ by appointment.

Next up in the Double Agents: Play and Performance in Digital Worlds series at SODA, we welcome Sahjan Kooner and Chris Paul Daniels. 

Sahjan Kooner is an artist and filmmaker working with video and installation to build expansive, speculative worlds that explore technological, social and racialised structures. For their upcoming exhibition at FACT, Sahjan Kooner collaborates with young people in Liverpool as curators and storytellers to reimagine the museums of tomorrow through their identities, mythologies and dreams. Their recent work also explores their ancestral village in North India through science fiction and fantasy, blending personal experience with technology and ecology to imagine its possible futures. 

Chris Paul Daniels() is a Manchester-based artist and filmmaker whose work responds to place through experimental observation and communal memory. His practice often merges documentary and fiction, with internationally exhibited projects including Unravel, co-winner of the Deutsche Bank Award for Art, and commissions shown across venues such as Tate Britain, the ICA and the BFI. 

Join us on 30th April for this session at SODA Cinema.

Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at SODA, Chris Paul Daniels, has created an experimental new film that will feature in Curtain Up, a group exhibition at The Lowry that explores how artists capture the anticipation, heightened emotion and shared energy of being in an audience. 
 
His film, Give Yourself a Round of Applause, uses more than 50 pieces of amateur production footage from Manchester Met’s North West Film Archive (NWFA) spanning almost 80 years. The clips range from school plays and home videos to amateur theatre productions from the late 1920s to today. 
 
Daniels said: “Give Yourself a Round of Applause is about the power of being in an audience. I used a montage of existing material to create something new. It has its own story, but it uses a variety of films as a springboard to tell a different narrative that reflects on the present day.  
 
Daniels will also take part in Double Agents: Play and Performance in Digital Worlds, a monthly seminar series run by SODA in collaboration with FACT exploring the social, political and cultural impact of advanced digital technologies. His joint seminar on April 30 will discuss the making of his work, including this latest project.

👉Read further into this story in our latest article.

🔗Link in Bio.

Daniel Murphy is a Manchester Based former BA Photography student at SODA who was part of last year’s cohort of graduates.

His degree show project “Touching Distance” is a thoughtful narrative-driven body of work that explores identity, transition and the uncertain space between youth and adulthood.

“When I set out to create this project, my primary aim was to make something that felt deliberate, intimate, and executed with care,” Daniel explains. “With hopes of building a career in fashion and portrait photography, I viewed this as a chance to produce work that felt more artistically considered while embracing a contemporary visual presentation.”

During his time on the course, Daniel developed his analogue practice through regular darkroom use and hands-on experimentation, helping him refine both his creative voice and technical style.

Since graduating from Manchester Met, he has been building experience across the industry through assisting, production work and his own commissions, while continuing to develop his independent practice. His recent work has leaned further into fashion, press and portraiture as he works towards a career in commercial photography.

Touching Distance has also been realised in book form as a visual essay on maturity, memory and the spaces we inhabit while discovering who we are becoming.

We’re excited to see where Daniel’s creative journey takes him next.

Images 1-4: Touching Distance
Images 5-6: Recent Work