This year, we’ve run Blister Cinemas in Margate and Cardiff to help us create our Animate Projects commission “Battle of Blister”.
Blister Cinema has been created in collaboration with scientist Dr Neil Dufton and is an Animate Projects commission supported by the Wellcome Trust.
Here is an overview of the three Blister Cinema events. You can read more about our animation and the whole Wellcome Trust project on the Silent Signal website.
Blister Cinema 1 @ GEEK, Margate – 20-22 Feb
A room full of interactive art games which took you inside an infected human blister. The games use Kinect sensors to put the audience right inside the action. The health of the host is at stake – will the infection take over or will the immune cells restore normality?
Blister Cinema 2 @ ArcadeCardiff – 10-18 Apr
We created an interactive art science zone representing an infected human blister. You could play the part of various microbial elements pushing and pulling your way through bacterial obstructions, spreading, multiplying, engulfing and destroying – taking part in physical interactions which form elements of the battle between infection and inflammation.
Photos from the event can be seen on our Blister Cinema Flickr page
Computer Arts Society Talk
Hosted by Dr Nick Lambert of the Computer Arts Society, this was the first CAS talk held in Cardiff. Genetic Moo discussed Blister Cinema, exploring the technical and artistic challenges in simulating the inflammation process and explaining the Silent Signal project of which it is a part. Helping Genetic Moo were three of their collaborators.
- Nicola Schauerman on the project as a whole from funding to filming.
- Tim Pickup on using Kinect to create Myron Krueger inspired interactions
- Dr Nick Lambert on the use of D.I.Y. Dome projection
- Dr Neil Dufton on scientific visualisation techniques
- Marcus West on the early days of the Computer Arts Society (giving talk in photo below)
In April, our 360 degree image of Tracer was selected for the Wellcome Trust’s image of the week.
Blister Cinema 3 @ Limbo, Margate – 1-19 Jun
This final event created an interactive film set for performers and the public and was the most important and complex part of the Battle Of Blister project. It was where we finally got all the artworks, programs, props and performers together to work for 10 days on an interactive film set in Margate. There were over 20 collaborators, a professional videographer and multiple simultaneous interactive art works and cameras all capturing footage. This footage along with our Liquid Light experiments will be edited together into a short art science film about inflammation which is part of Silent Signal a project organised by Animate Projects and supported by the Wellcome Trust.
We are extremely happy with the variety and beauty of the footage captured and filmed – the richness of the imagery might make the editing simpler than we had anticipated. Each of the performers will also be receiving their own footage as short films which will be great for promoting the project in the future.
Thanks to Jason Brooks our videographer for being so brilliant, and Abigail and Bentley at Animate for their emotional support. And special thanks to our collaborating scientist Dr Neil Dufton for his huge enthusiasms and gentle scientific prods.
Thanks to all the collaborators who will be listed in future posts, and specially Rutter & Bennett who really got behind the project, with their crazy costumes and performing friends.
As part of the event we opened up to the public for a day and got over 80 people and a dog came through the doors of Limbo on Saturday which was a great turn out. Thanks to Stefan Costen for his extra pair of hands.
You can see many more images on our dedicated Flickr site.
