The body as a machine that has gone wrong. Cunningham builds figures out of prosthetics, animatronics and digital surgery, then films them in the dark until flesh and mechanism stop being separable. The grotesque rendered with engineering precision.
Why the Bureau files him. Cunningham's subject is the human form fused with, or replaced by, the machine: a robot built to the shape of a woman, a drumming rig topped with an animal's head, a child remade as a mass of swollen limbs. This is the same territory the tradition works in sound, where the body and the apparatus are pushed together until the join disappears. He arrives at it through the moving image rather than through a record, but the governing instinct, that the mechanical and the bodily belong in one frame, is one the Bureau files at the centre of its concerns.
He trained first as a model-maker and prosthetics builder, and worked early on as a comic artist for 2000 AD under the name "Chris Halls". That grounding shows: his pieces are built, not merely shot, and the effects tend to be physical objects in front of the camera before they are anything done afterwards. The method matters here because it is the opposite of weightlessness. The figures have mass, and the horror reads as something that could be touched.
The gallery works are where the sensibility stands clear of any commission. Flex (2000), made for the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, suspends two figures in darkness and lets them move between tenderness and violence under hard light. Monkey Drummer (2001), shown at the Venice Biennale, is a built machine: a many-armed mechanical kit struck in impossible rhythm, the organic and the engineered locked together. Rubber Johnny (2005), released through Warp Films, films a confined, disfigured figure in night-vision green over six minutes, the artist using his own body as the model. None of these needs a band attached to it to belong in this archive.
Cunningham is best known to the general public through promotional film made for musicians, and that work is real, but the Bureau files the sensibility rather than the client list. He is filed in the influenced field: a visual practice that shares the tradition's preoccupations, the abject body, the cold machine, the dark interior, without being made from within the tradition's own personnel. Adjacent to it, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works; the influenced field collects the cinema and video that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same reservoir, where Begotten and Tetsuo are also filed.