We brought It’s Alive! to NEoN Digital Arts Festival in 2016. This is Scotland’s biggest digital art event with exhibitions, performances, talks and demos all over the beautiful city of Dundee. Our contribution took place in the Wellgate Shopping centre.
The 2016 festival theme was ‘The Spaces We’re In’ and considered alternative uses and futures for virtual and material spaces. Taking over an empty unit in the shopping center was a great way to bring our art to the Dundee public who showed great enthusiasm for projected interactive art. Over 500 people attended across the event with a range of responses to our ‘wee beasties’ from fear to delight.
We showed a mix of old and new projects including the kinect driven Virus, Hector the Sea Slug (a recent digital portrait commission), got dozens of kids to become squidlets and filled the walls with maggots and cockroaches. We gave talks and interacted with the public as we went along, including some large groups of students.
The festival was really well organised and we saw a range of art including electronic cities, walking clouds, alternative sci-fi video games, VR, bands and installations. We got to meet the other artists from around the world and also made connections with the fascinating D’arcy Thompson Museum.
We’re visiting Dundee again this year to run some Animat themed workshops, and hopefully will work with NEoN again in the future.
