Hi, I'm Jon Beaton (1988, UK). I'm a British-Cypriot filmmaker based in Ghent, Belgium.

I'm fascinated by handmade gadgets, contraptions and mechanisms – devices as physical or digital interfaces that mediate experience in strange or novel ways. I'm excited by the inventive qualities of analogue mechanisms, not for nostalgia’s sake, but because they offer alternate ways of seeing, translating, expressing. Rather than chasing a retro aesthetic, I'm intrigued by the material poetics of tools, by how form shapes meaning, and by the eccentric or playful logic of invention. Whether it’s an oscilloscope, a Pepper’s Ghost rig, or a DIY slide projector, I love when the tool becomes part of the message.

I've always been interested in filmmaking.When I was around five years old, I made a moon landscape out of clay for a stop-motion animation. All I was missing was a camera to film it with. When I was around ten years old, my brother and I would blow up toy vehicles with fireworks and take photos of the smouldering wreckage, inspired by special effects in movies. As a teenager I fell in love with animation – a way to make films from my bedroom, with no creative or financial restraints.Today I make films that seem to centre on a number of themes and interests …

I'm interested in the limitations and possibilities of language. These interests don't stem from my freelance work as a writer and translator. Rather, my freelance work stemmed from those interests. When I use the word #translation in the context of my artistic work, I'm rarely speaking literally about translation between languages like Dutch and English. Often I simply mean 'converting' one thing to another, such as words into sounds, or sounds into smells. Sometimes an image is translated from one medium to another, such as from text to image, or from one carrier to another, such as from paper to oscilloscope.

I've often felt like an outsider myself, which is why I relate to this subject (and archetype) in films.In my case this feeling stems from my neurodivergence, my moving from the UK to Ireland as a kid, my moving to Belgium as an adult, my frustration with gender norms and, later in life, my being vegetarian and now vegan. It took a long time to untangle all the ways I felt different growing up. Now I'm interested in raising voices of outsiders and creating a more tolerant world.

In a way, what filmmaker is not interested in time and memory? Still, these topics do seem to come up more often and more explicitly in my films. In how I present the world or in what I reflect on.

I feel strongly drawn to first-person narratives and perspectives. In the books I read (autobiographies, fiction told in the first person, or non-fiction which is often written in the first person), in the films I watch and in the films I make.

I have made non-film work in these categories before, some of which is documented on the site. I may add more documentation of this to the site, but for now my primary focus will be on film.