On Thursday 2 December 2021 at 4:00pm GMT the Telematic LASER will present the online panel discussion ALL THE WORLD’S A SCREEN with performance, Shakespeare and technology specialists… Pascale Aebischer, Lucy Askew and Sarah Ellis. They will discuss the impact of the pandemic on the performing arts, reflecting on the histories, contemporary practices and futures of online theatre that creatively engages remote performers and audiences.

Register Here:

https://leonardo.info/telematic-laser-all-the-world-s-a-screen/

The panel will be co-moderated by Paul Sermon and Satinder Gill from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Covid-19 Response project Telepresence Stage. The Telematic LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) is co-hosted by the University of Brighton’s Centre for Digital Media Cultures, Leonardo ISAST and the Third Space Network.

This Telematic LASER brings together three leading performance, Shakespeare and technology experts, who have each confronted the effects of the pandemic on the performing arts through distinctive and innovative approaches to online theatre. The panel will provide a unique opportunity to present, contrast and discuss their results, as well as the conceptual and technical challenges they faced in pursuit of newfound digital aesthetics that define a language of online theatre. How is it possible to convey tragedy, comedy and magic through code, 3D modelling, live audio-video streams and interactive systems? And how have online theatre audiences learnt to suspend disbelief in new and necessary ways? Overlooking the occasional technical glitch or even embracing it as the authenticity of liveness, negotiating latency, navigating time zones, and identifying with a mirrored image of self, are all new online phenomenon. How do we overcome them or turn them to our advantage? All theatre is essentially technical, but what are the advantages, disadvantages and distinct differences between online and physical theatre? Whilst online theatre has presented new forms of dramaturgy and choreography through new paradigms, structures and experience, is it essentially reframing how we touch, how we feel intimacy and experience proprioception, for both performers and audiences or is it extending our understanding of their essential qualities?

Panellists

Pascale Aebischer is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. She has a particular interest in bodies and performance technologies (from candlelight through social media to ‘live’ theatre broadcast and digital performance). Pascale is leading the coordination of the AHRC’s Covid-19 research portfolio as Principal Investigator of The Pandemic and Beyond: the Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery. 

Lucy Askew is Chief Executive and Creative Producer at Creation Theatre, based in Oxford. They have been producing and performing innovative theatre productions in alternative locations and settings for over 20 years. Since lockdown in March 2020, Lucy has produced an impressive programme of unique online performances, including a Zoom audience engagement production of The Tempest and an ambitious choose-your-own-adventure take on Romeo and Juliet.

Sarah Ellis is Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Through her recent partnership with the UKRI Audience of the Future programme Sarah led and produced ‘Dream’, an online virtual midsummer forest experience for the RSC, inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Using motion capture cameras and 3D gaming software ‘Dream’ explores how audiences and avatars could be experienced as possible futures for live performance.

Moderators

Paul Sermon is a Telematic Artist, Professor of Visual Communication at the University of Brighton and Telepresence Stage Principal Investigator.

Satinder Gill is Research affiliate in the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, researching the body in sense-making and presence.

Production

Telematic LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) is co-hosted quarterly by Paul Sermon from the University of Brighton, Centre for Digital Media Cultures and Randall Packer from the Third Space Network. A program of the Leonardo International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), the series is comprised of online public dialogues and performances that feature discussion, presentation and experimentation among leading artists, researchers, scientists and performers in the area of art and telematics.

Telepresence Stage is a UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project led by University of Brighton UK, in collaboration with LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore and the Third Space Network in Washington DC. In response to the Covid-19 impact on the performing arts sector, this project aims to identify new and creative ways for actors, dancers and other performing arts professionals to rehearse and interact together in shared online spaces and to produce collaborative live performances from remote sites.

The University of Brighton https://www.brighton.ac.uk/digital-media-cultures/

The Third Space Network https://thirdspacenetwork.com

For more information please contact Paul Sermon p.sermon@brighton.ac.uk

3SN Celebrates Life of Media Visionary
Gene Youngblood Memorial Tribute
The Unfinished Communications Revolution

Media visionary and activist Gene Youngblood, author of the 1970 book Expanded Cinema in which he predicted the future of the media arts as a communications revolution, died on April 6, 2021, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

On Tuesday, June 15, 4pm EDT  9PM BST, the Third Space Network will present online the Gene Youngblood Memorial Tribute: The Unfinished Communications Revolution honouring his life and work. The artists, curators, and media scholars who will speak about Youngblood’s colourful life and historic contribution to the arts, are among those who pioneered the emerging forms of experimental film, video, and communications art during the latter part of the 20th century.

The Gene Youngblood Memorial Tribute will be co-moderated by 3SN Creative Director Randall Packer and media artist Kit Galloway. The event is a presentation of the Telematic LASER series (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous), co-hosted by 3SN, Currents New Media (Santa Fe), Leonardo/ISAST, and the University of Brighton/School of Art/Centre for Digital Media Cultures in the UK.

Register here
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/gene-youngblood-tribute/register

Telematic LASER is co-hosted quarterly by Randall Packer of the Third Space Network & Paul Sermon of the University of Brighton/School of Art/Centre for Digital Media Cultures. A program of the Leonard/International Society of the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, the series is comprised of online public dialogues and performances that feature discussion, presentation and experimentation among leading artists, researchers, scientists and performers in the area of art & telematics.

Recently Professor Alison Bruce and Professor Andre Viljoen brought together University of Brighton researchers across the disciplines of Architecture, Design, Computing, Engineering and Mathematics for a range of exciting conversations to get to know each other better, see how they think about similar topics from their different perspectives, and think about if / how they may work together in the future.

Topics included:

Cultural heritages in times of digitisation and decolonisation. Dr Katy Beinart and Dr Karina Rodriguez Echavarria 

The Circular City and Rethinking Architecture and Engineering. Katrin Bohn , Duncan Baker Brown and Dr Yan Wang

Hyper-local Production and Advanced Engineering. James Tooze and Prof Marco Marengo

Interplays between experimental design and engineering. Dr Sarah Stevens and Dr Poorang Piroozfar 

Conversations about cybernetics. Dr Ben Sweeting and Prof Haris Mouratidis 

Machine learning and design. Dr Marcus Winter and Dr Derek Covill 

Following on from More Culture Less Medicine last year, for 4 days in November 2020 the Brighton & Hove City Council Arts, Health and Wellbeing Group will be bringing together a wide spectrum of people from Arts, Health and Social Care to look at some of the key developments within the sector and to explore how we establish Brighton and Hove as a Centre of Excellence for Arts, Health & Wellbeing. Duncan Bullen (Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton) and Dr Aristea Fotopoulou (project lead ART/DATA/HEALTH) shall both be presenting.

The conference will take the form of a series of bite-sized morning sessions, 10am-midday every day, via zoom. The sessions are FREE to book via the hyperlinks below,

Each event will include cross sector speakers and presentations, showcasing of diverse and high quality practice and open discussion.

Each day will be themed, as follows:

• Monday 23rd: The Big Picture – considering the international, national and local context and the latest research findings. BOOK DAY 1 HERE

• Tuesday 24th: The Big Challenges – tackling inequalities and finding opportunities. BOOK DAY 2 HERE

• Wednesday 25th: The Big Vision – creating a shared vision for Brighton and Hove (this
session will be led by the HERA Partnership) BOOK DAY 3 HERE

• Thursday 26th: The Big Conversation – exploring the issues, the opportunities, the
developing language and practice BOOK DAY 4 HERE

Brighton CCA is delighted to launch the first Edition of the Grand Parade Press; a series of publications produced by Brighton CCA and University of Brighton Creative Futures, about the pursuit of knowledge and the mechanisms through which we acquire and share an understanding of our material, social and environmental surroundings.

Engaging in research, the act of investigation, is fundamental to human nature and yet what is considered of value in research is deeply contested. By interweaving research from the University of Brighton and elsewhere with the Brighton CCA programme, the Grand Parade Press articulates a more comprehensive conception of what research can be. Is it for example, only the preserve of the academic community? Is it necessarily empirical? Must methodologies be logical in their approach and what is the role of chance? How is it possible to characterise the relationship between research and understanding? How do we consider artistic practice in this context?

How to Make an Image of Something You’ve Never Seen begins with the idea that research can be as equally embodied by sculpture as an equation and that the processes of making and thinking are closely bound. Preconceptions, even prejudices, about the answers to these questions have embedded divisions in the ways we value different approaches to the pursuit of knowledge.

http://coastalcurrents.org.uk/grounded/

GROUNDED: 

A SEASON OF  SCREENDANCE

28 July – 9 August 2020

grounded is a season of online screenings that brings work together under the framework of Screendance, a term that signals an affinity between choreographic and cinematic approaches to art practice, an attraction between dance and film that is as old as cinema itself.

Supported by the University of Brighton and focusing on artists predominantly based in the south- east of England and London, grounded proposes a way of thinking about movement as a political act. Set against the backdrop of Covid-19, the season considers the variety of ways artists use movement in video and film to explore the relationship of the body to society, of confinement to imagination, and health to politics. Much like the Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory about the equalising power of death, the programme is a space, albeit virtual, where we can reflect on questions around solitude and communication, community and identity, solidarity and our futures.

grounded echoes the approach of those working in grounded theory who gather materials together to understand the social conventions that affect how people act and relate to each other. The season asks how we may break new ground in developing a social fabric that is welcoming, how we traverse boundaries and dissolve conventions, how we nurture newness and mourn what we have lost, how we remember and how we forget, how we explore what it means to be human.

The programme is composed of five online screenings, each appearing online for 24 hours from 6pm, and is hosted by Coastal Currents, Hastings UK. Curated by Claudia Kappenberg, University of Brighton and Fiontán Moran, Tate Modern.

LIST OF ARTISTS:

Jordan Baseman, David Blandy, Holly Blakey, Lucy Cash, Lisa Clifford, Phoebe Collings-James, Hugh O’Connor, Oona Doherty, Dave Tynan, Becky Edmunds, Adham Faramawy, HRH, Evan Ifekoya, Onyeka Igwe, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Andrew Kötting, Paul Maheke, Zoë Marden, Ursula Mayer, Harriet Middleton Baker, Graeme Miller, Hugh O’Connor, Harold Offeh, Florence Peake, Sally Potter, Yvonne Rainer, Ben Rivers, John Smith, Eve Stainton, Dave Tynan, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Cheryl White, Gray Wielebinski.

Screening programme and film streams here:
http://coastalcurrents.org.uk/grounded/

Creative Futures are delighted to share the update below from Louise Colbourne (Course leader for MA Graphic Design at the University of Brighton) on her exciting VR maker and exhibition space know as the “Studio Lab Project” that has been co-supported by Creative Futures and the Schools of Art and Media here at the University of Brighton.

The aim of this research and enterprise project was to explore new horizons from my own curatorial initiatives, whilst being able to introduce researchers within the Schools of Art and Media to the creative potential of VR via an accessible, web-based platform. After some changes of the initial plans, the project has developed well and is now entering the second phase of development as a VR maker and exhibition space.

Development installations made to test the boundaries of Mozilla Hubbs

We are developing a process of accessibility that allows relative ease for makers to be able to work with tools and gain enough basic knowledge to create VR studio/gallery spaces and experiences. These spaces, places and environments are shareable and interactive through the use of the Mozilla Hubs platform. With this platform it is possible to use a broad range of software to make 3D digital objects and assets to import, along with existing digital images and videos, to create immersive virtual installations or exhibition designs. The ultimate aim is that this relatively simple in-road into creative VR will then inspire makers to utilise more specialised open source platforms such as Unity 3D, in order to make more sophisticated environments.

Development installations include video loops and 360 Photographs

Going forward, as each of the finished projects for the Studio Lab are completed they will then be housed on a dedicated website, where they can be viewed by anyone who would like to access them on a computer, tablet or even smart phones, with or without VR head-sets.

So far the project has enabled myself and others involved to explore the potential capabilities of this open source platform and to test what is possible. The first space we built was deliberately ‘over-loaded’ with content in order to push the boundaries and test the possibilities.

Scott Macpherson is the main developer collaborating on this project

We are now working with the artists David Blandy and Larry Achiampong to install one of their collaborative pieces; the Finding Fanon trilogy into the VR studio/gallery space. This installation is taking the form of various interactive rooms that are accessed by the visitor. Visitors will take on a basic avatar form to explore the work within a virtual environment which allows them to interact with other visitors in the space, which can potentially include the makers and artists (good for gallery tours). This virtual space has enabled a different collaborative curatorial experience between the developer, myself and the artists, who have stated that this an ‘exciting new development’ for their work.

The exhibition will launch in September 2020 and will showcase the possibilities of the new Studio Lab as a facility.

Preview image from the three rooms being developed for the installation of the Finding Fanon trilogy by David Blandy and Larry Achiampong

Louise Colbourne

Course leader for MA Graphic Design at the University of Brighton