How Shane Akeroyd created an online museum of moving-image art: ‘Perhaps I was more prepared to give all kinds of media a go’

A boxer barrels around the ring with a nerveless energy, striking at the air. He could be punch drunk, except for the blistering speed of his upper cut. His acid rage is directed at an invisible opponent; perhaps he’s fighting his own insecurities. This bracing provocation is Vs. (Battle of Brisbane), 2023, an NFT by the artist Paul Pfeiffer featuring edited footage of eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao in the fight of his life against Jeff Horn, who has been digitally erased.

‘Media determine our situation,’ wrote Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. ‘What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.’ The post-structuralist was making an argument about how we adapt ourselves to the machines we use, and it seems fitting that Pfeiffer chose the Filipino boxer, nicknamed Pac-Man, to embody our existential crisis with digital technology.

You can watch Pfeiffer’s NFT at the Akeroyd Collection, the digital platform developed by the tech financier Shane Akeroyd to make more than 200 moving-image works from his extensive art collection available to the public.

A quick scroll through this virtual pleasure garden offers a comprehensive survey of moving-image art over the past 30 years, and it is an invaluable research tool. There are stills from films by early pioneers Joan Jonas and Charles Atlas. The collection is also home to Jeremy Deller’s sprawling history of rave culture, and Duncan Campbell’s study of the American car industry.

However, it is Derek Jarman’s baroque fantasy Electric Fairy (1971), depicting a fairy playing with a pumpkin in a science-fiction universe, that sets the tone. Many of the later works in Akeroyd’s collection have a futuristic quality: somewhere between Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, Donna Haraway’s essay A Cyborg Manifesto, published in 1985, and the digitally manipulated shorts found on TikTok. Take, for example, Jordan Wolfson’s uncanny montage, Raspberry Poser (2012), a divisive journey through contemporary culture; or Sin Wai Kin’s glorious fantasies about gender identity.

The art in Akeroyd’s online collection raises many questions about contemporary culture’s relationship to technology — the kind of issues Kittler explored a quarter of a century ago, suggesting that we are deluded to imagine we are masters of our technological domain. The irony is not lost on Akeroyd, and he readily admits that the collection has caused a few headaches.

Akeroyd did not originally set out to acquire moving-image work. ‘I don’t come from an art background, so perhaps I was more prepared to give all kinds of media a go,’ he says. Born into a working-class home in Kent in the south of England, Akeroyd studied economics at UCL. He began buying art through a friend, the gallerist Paul Stolper.

‘He represented some of the Young British Artists, and through him I met Jeremy Deller, Gary Hume and Damien Hirst,’ he recalls. To his eternal regret, he never bought a painting by Peter Doig. ‘I used to play street hockey with him in the 1980s, and someone mentioned he was a painter, but I just didn’t feel it was my place to ask.’

In the wake of Cool Britannia and the reshaping of the economy around the arts by Tony Blair’s Labour government in the late 1990s, Akeroyd suddenly found himself in competition with other collectors. ‘Everyone was running about trying to buy the next crazy, fantastic painting,’ he recalls.

It was around this time that he bought Adam Chodzko’s poetic intervention, Flasher (1996). The artist rented videos from Blockbuster, added 60 seconds of footage of red marine distress signal flares to the end of the films, and returned them to the shop. ‘I thought it was a wonderful piece of disruption,’ says Akeroyd. Other moving-image work followed, including an animation by Angus Fairhurst and Mark Leckey’s DVD Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore — the artist's soul-inspired romp through northern working-class subcultures.

In discussions with Derek Jarman’s early collaborator James Mackay, together with Amanda Wilkinson, who represents Jarman’s estate, he began looking at Jarman’s moving-image work, including Electric Fairy — Jarman’s first film. At one time it was thought to have been lost, and Akeroyd realised how important it was to keep the film in the public realm.

‘Derek Jarman is one of the greatest British artists ever,’ he says, ‘but at the time there were great works that few had thought to buy or exhibit. Thankfully through the work of LUMA Foundation, which bought and restored Jarman’s Super 8s, he is now getting the recognition he deserves.’

The decision also led Akeroyd to give much-needed support to younger artists pioneering new technology. ‘No one was really interested in funding their ideas,’ he says. Today his website runs a rolling programme of recent work, which is currently screening films by James Richards, Aki Sasamoto, Ingrid Pollard and Tiffany Sia. Akeroyd also supports large-scale projects such as Sarah Morris’s cinematic portrait ETC (2024), which was recently exhibited on the façade of Hong Kong’s M+ museum.

Managing the digital side of his collection is hard work, he says: ‘It is so counterintuitive. You think of digital art as being modern and very manageable — a bit like your phone — but it is 100 times more complicated than owning a painting or a sculpture.’

First, there is the technology, which can become redundant very quickly, with some works in danger of corroding: ‘I have artworks on VHS, reel-to-reel and CD, boxes of USB sticks.’ He does not yet employ a technician, but ‘it is just a matter of time’.

Part of Akeroyd’s desire to digitise the collection stems from his wish to ensure that the art remains accessible. ‘I don’t want to be the only one able to see these works because I can afford to maintain the technology,’ he says. However, he is keen to show the art in the way it was originally intended, and to that end has been collaborating with artists and galleries to respect the wishes of those who made the works. So far, the artists have been very supportive of the project.

He admits there are days when he wakes up and wonders why he started the online collection. ‘You need a web designer and an editor, and there are endless conversations around it. I bought a Wilhelm Sasnal painting at the weekend and I thought, oh this is so much nicer, just put it on the wall, it’s a lot less work.’

The financier, who is chief strategy officer of the technology provider Clearwater Analytics, is primarily based in Hong Kong, but maintains homes in the UK, Spain and Switzerland, and his art collection is dispersed across the four countries. He would like to bring it together under one roof, and has been looking at a farmhouse in Kent as a potential gallery. Tate director Maria Balshaw and the gallerist Sadie Coles are advising him.

Would he consider donating the collection to a museum? ‘Yes, but the problem for museums is that funds for storage and conservation are becoming more scarce. The days when an art collector could leave the whole of their collection to an institution are coming to an end. Many museums do not have the capacity or the money to look after anything but the very best pieces.’

The answer, he says, is to lend works from his collection and support museums financially. Akeroyd recently finalised a major donation to support Tate’s acquisitions of contemporary British art, and he funded the Kunsthalle Basel’s exhibition of the British artist P. Staff. He sits on the boards of various museums, including M+ and Para Site in Hong Kong, Artists Space in New York, and the Chisenhale Gallery in London, and continues to back the role of associate curator of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Now a year into akeroydcollection.com, he doesn’t see it ending any time soon. ‘A collection needs to have an identity — it is a much more interesting proposition for people,’ he observes. ‘For a collection to be engaging, it needs to be more than just a few hundred works of art.’

The Akeroyd Collection