Jim Whiting (b. 1951)

Gallery Unavailable

Alias:
James Whiting

Birthplace:
Paris, France

Born:
January 11, 1951

Jim Whiting (born 1951) is a British artist and inventor. He was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in Salisbury (now Harare), Zimbabwe before returning to the UK with his family in 1959. He studied Electronic Engineering & Systems Control at Queen Mary College and then sculpture at Saint Martins School of Art after a foundation at High Wycombe Art College.  Whiting's first major installation was in 1979 at The Hayward gallery in London, His Business Machine was chosen by artist Helen Chadwick as part of the summer show. Other shows of his animated figurative works followed, including Purgatory at British museums, galleries and festivals, and Heavenly Bodies on the roof of the Royal National Theatre in 1981. He received international recognition in 1984 after his robot-like sculptures were featured dancing in Herbie Hancock's music video for "Rockit" directed by duo Godley & Creme, winning the first MTV Video Music Award for Best Art Direction.  Whiting's Mechanical Theatre was commissioned in 1987 by Andre Heller for his Luna Luna art/amusement park in Hamburg. From 1988 to 1992 he took his Unnatural Bodies show on tour, exhibiting in Cologne, Zürich, Berlin, Basel, with Galerie Littmann, and later in Glasgow, Linz (Ars Electronica) and also as the Tower in London's Broadgate and Aurillac Festival. In 1994 he created a waggon installation for Klaus Littmann's KunstZug, which was exhibited at stations in Switzerland, France and Germany.  His work has now been incorporated into his variété venue Bimbotown based in the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei a former factory in Leipzig that has become home to dozens of international artists and galleries. Originally launched in 1993 in Basel, Bimbotown moved to Leipzig in 1996 where Whiting continues to host parties, which The Guardian newspaper recently described in a round up of the best of Germany as "a mix of music, theatre and lots of crazy stuff by artists from all over Europe".  In 2007 a new version of his Mechanical Theatre was commissioned for the Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds) theme park in Austria, which was conceived by André Heller and features work by famous modern artists. He continues to exhibit his installations in Europe.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Carpenter:
1992  My Cousin Vinny

Thanks:
1989  Virgin Machine
1992  My Cousin Vinny

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.