Hi, I’m Rob.
I’m a multidisciplinary artist from Wrexham, working across performance, photography and film. My projects blur art and everyday life, often paired with documentaries that share the story behind the work.
Currently longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2025, I’m always open to opportunities to exhibit and collaborate.
Diolch yn fawr ;)
Happiness / Hapus
16mm short film written by ChatGPT
Wrexham, 2023.
Artist commission for Public Health Wales.
statement
“Back in 2022, Public Health Wales had a callout for Welsh artists to send creative ideas to support their new mental health programme, Hapus. This was right before the ChatGPT-boom, before the tool had fully entered the public consiousness.
I applied with an idea to ask people the question ‘What makes you happy?’ and use AI to transform the answers into a story we could film in Wrexham. I posted a Tiktok, asking people to comment in order to take part. I then gathered the 179 comments, ready to feed them into a system that could write a filmable script.
When I first pithced the idea, I had played around with some text generators, but it wasn’t necessarily clear which one I would use. Then - enter ChatGPT. The generator exploded in popularity and quickly became the obvious ‘writer’ for the project.
The final story features a student befriending an elderly man who teaches her how to play the violin.
Next I assembled a local crew, including Emmy-winner Leighton Cox and shot the film in the bus station and Bellevue Park on 16mm film. The physical film was developed at the famous Kodak lab in Pinewood Studios, just outside of London. Finally, editing was completed, including an original score from DAACI, using new AI tools.
Ultimately I produced a final 16mm short film + a documentary about the process, exploring my feelings related to the use of AI inside the project.
It’s a journey that took me from my hometown in Wrexham, to Pinewood, to SXSW in Texas and eventually Hollywood - where the completion of the project lined up almost perfectly with the start of the WGA and SAF-AFTRA strikes in 2023.
I had fully witnessed the creative community embrace the new tools, before mostly rejecting them. The entire project left me feeling equally mixed. But I beleive that at some point in the future we may look back at artistic expierments like this with curiosity, as they offer a real window in the first explorations of their use.”
Cast & Crew:
Rebekah Bentley, ChatGPT, Robert Corcoran, Leighton Cox, DAACI, Sasha Duchnowska, Owen Jones, Ben Jones, Sam Jones, Gee Parry, Summer Piscikaite, Tim Rooney, Alex Sitford, Joseph Smith, James Stevens, David Underwood, James Veal, Luiz Zarzo.
photos
16mm film
documentary
press
• Hapus - Public Health Wales