We opened the doors of The Margate School over the half term week to a huge variety of local creatives and makers enabling them to show their stuff and engage with the public. The festival formed the digital strand of Margate NOW, running in parallel with the Turner Prize.
As events and technologies turn our world inside out and upside down, the art world is also being shaken up. Computers encourage new approaches based on free, open, online, shared, collaborative, massively parallel processes where everyone is involved: filming, documenting, playing, making, building and creating. Electrical energies are bursting out, pulsating and mutating into the world and there is no stopping them.
Digital art is alive and it is spreading. NOW digital champions this evolution in creativity
At NOW digital you can engage with interactive art, try your hand at creative coding and experience film, music, electronics and visuals made by a growing local digital scene. Your creations will be instantly added into this ever-changing show.
NOW digital is organised by artist duo Genetic Moo. Over the last two years, we have been working with Victoria Barrow-Williams (Creative Learning and Participation Manager at Dreamland Margate) on large scale projects helping hundreds of children and adults get creative with computers and NOW digital will showcase the results.
Venue: The Margate School in the former Woolworths building on Margate High Street
Dates: Fri 18 – Sun 27 Oct, open daily 12-6pm with some lates
All events and workshops are FREE
The venue:
We’ve collaborated with The Margate School to organise #NOWdigital in the former Woolworths building on Margate High Street. The Margate School is an exciting new development for the town and has just opened an accredited art school running a Fine Art Masters program on the themes of Art, Society and Nature.
SCHEDULE:
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Details for all events and participants below
SPECIAL EVENTS :
EVENT: GAMING DAY
The Cliffs Edge is a retro video-gaming collective based in Margate whose cult pop-up events and exhibitions challenge people’s preconceptions about video games. They will be unleashing hands-on gaming experiences and demonstrations on Tues 22nd October 12-6pm themed around the bedroom coding and hacker culture of the 1980s. Their regular social evenings will be returning to Cliffs on Sat 26th October.
Also in the space on Tuesday will be Maggot Brain (multiplayer art-game by Broadstairs College students) and a new horror WarioWare game by East Kent Mencap and a full body Kinect game by Genetic Moo for you to enjoy.
The Micro Museum of Ramsgate will be joining #NOWdigital on the video games day Oct 22nd from 12-6pm. Come along and play their demos and hear about their amazing collection of video games and consoles.
EVENT
Exploding Cinema – DIY short film show – “no stars, no funding, no taste”. Exploding Cinema regularly screens underground film in squats, pubs, clubs, cafes and halls across the UK. Fighting against industry elitism, they’ve shown more than 5000 low or no budget films/videos. They are radically anti-curatorial – at Exploding Cinema anyone can screen their film, anyone can join the collective.
EVENT
Gretchen Andrew, Internet Imperialist, will be joining us to talk about “Turner Prize” her digital art performance deploying a systemic limitation of how the internet thinks to make it appear “as if” she has won this year’s Turner Prize
EVENT
Nine diverse performers will fill the space with laptop wizardry, algorithmic rhythms, mashed up electronics – and some of the most ear-scrunching audio Margate has ever heard. Algorave etc. has two parts an electronica part with ambient soundscapes and experimental sounds followed by the Algorave part which will involve live coding banging beats. This is way out there for Margate – come along and hear how people are tackling digital music making now. Free event and refreshments.
Ed Kelly & Geri McEwan – live audio synthesis and String Theory electronics and violin
John Bowers – modular synthesis | rostrum camera | room resonance | field recordings
Simon Limbrick – virtuoso electronic percussionist and composer
Isn’tses – Harsh Fun / Space Opera / Noise-hop / DIY electronics
Zachary Aghaizu – electronic and soul influenced soundscapes
Cherif Hashizume – innovative modular synthesist + audio coder
Hortense – poetic TidalCycle magic
hmurd – experimental bangers
Kim Cosmik has also been added to the lineup.
EVENT
Award winning artist Rocio von Jungenfeld will be running an electronics workshop to build zones of flow (iii) a photo-sensitive audiovisual installation where virtual water is video mapped over a 2.5m paper-boat concealing dozens of light-dependent-resistors. When activated, they send electric signals to light-emitting-diodes inside small paper-boats, and are scattered across the floor.
EVENT
Six NOW digital artist/makers will show work and discuss their practice. Discussion led by Dr. Dan Strutt.
Digital technologies encourage new approaches to art based on free, open, online, shared, collaborative, massively parallel processes where everyone is involved: filming, documenting, playing, making, building and creating. Electric energies are bursting out, pulsating and mutating into the world and there is no stopping them. Featuring local artists Rocio von Jungenfeld, Martin Tanton, Matt Mapleston, Holly Slingsby + Daisy Latham and Julian Hand.
EVENT
Margate Film Festival presents Cinesthesia – a mesmerising night including an experimental light show from Jullian Hand, glitchy electronic music from Sunosis & Liotia, immersive projections and found footage. Follow this link to find out more about the event and the rest of the film festival which has screenings around Margate in October.
including Dancing with the Tide
Feat. Colin Welsh (AKA Sunosis), WALKPro3D & Ricky Cox.
A bespoke immersive live audio-visual performance featuring walkabout projections with a live electronic cinematic soundscape. Be immersed in the sights and sounds of Margate, from above and below, featuring the diverse voices of local residents, makers, shakers, curators and facilitators who ride against the tide.
EVENT:
Also part of Margate Film Festival, an afternoon of short films. This is a specially curated programme of short films exploring our complex relationship with the sea. An infinite resource for food and energy, a holiday destination, a calming presence and a boundary between lands – how do we use, abuse and depend on the ocean? Free entry and light refreshments.
Read more about the film festival here
PARTICIPANTS:
We’re working with the computer game fans at East Kent Mencap to build a WarioWare type game for NOW digital. If you’re a fan of mini-games then make sure to join us and try them out. Read more
Social artist and writer Dan Thompson will be artist-in-residence on Mon 21 -Tues 22, 2-6pm
Local sound artist Martin Tanton will be experimenting with his modular synths connected to live sensors and electronics in the space during the festival.
Also bringing electronic sound to the house will be Ed Kelly from Margate. Ed’s built a large library of Pure Data objects for synthesis, audio processing, sequencing, live sampling and audio file manipulation.
Micro-controllers are now part of a digital artist/maker’s toolkit with cheap and easy to use systems such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi introducing a whole new generation to control electronics. Local expert Matt Mapleston of Chanza Chanzo will be on hand to help you with your electronic queries and will also be demonstrating some of his recent tech projects.
The Thanet based STEAMettes will be building their own experiments with Arduino LED light strips, space station Microbits, wearable Adafruit and other electronic wizardry. Come along and see this amazing group of young girls in action each afternoon. The STEAMettes are guided by local astronomy and physics guru John Hislop.
Ramsgate Arts Primary School – all 220 kids built an Underwater City a digital film with creature making, Kinect animations, digital design, squidlets and creative coding. With help from Genetic Moo and Dreamland education.
Sarasara will be experimenting with audio visualisation
Among the films being shown will be local artist, Clare Thompson‘s Ghosts and Boo Stories made entirely on a vintage mobile phone and gif film Matinee.
We’re hoping to get 100s of Turner Prize visitors and local people to contribute to a large scale collaborative artwork called Leviathan. This piece is supported by Dreamland and will be a generative and interactive projection.
Shaun Prickimage is a Margate based tech artist who does amazing things with motion capture, 3d projections and animations for events, shows, and festivals. We’re looking forward to see what he brings to the space.
Local artist Holly Slingsby will be giving a short talk and showing her latest short film Approaching Viriditas (Epilogue), 2019 at the Saturday 26th late afternoon presentations (details to follow shortly). The film includes digital effects which Holly wrote at our coding club.
Guli Silberstein, a digital video artist, will be showing several works which use algorithmic processing, creating painterly audio-visual melt-downs. These will form part of a cinematic chill out space with large scale ambient films and sound.
Canterbury based sound artist Magz Hall will be bringing her Voicing Gender – Radio Hats project to the festival. Magz engaged a voice therapist to design a series of repetitious pitch changing exercises as used by trans and non-binary people. The work is relayed binaurally via the radio hats.
Daisy Latham will be showing ‘The End of the World’ which uses a personal AR Snapchat filter effect, and 3D animation software to create disturbing distorted selfies. Daisy will be giving a talk about her work on the Saturday 26th and you can have a go yourself with an interactive version of the piece.
Shona Davies, Dave Monaghan & Jon Klein will be showing one of their fabulous warped digital peepshows in the pick’n’mix section of Woolworths near the door. Peer through a small slit to reveal a miniature scene. The strapline for this work is ‘ No Tomorrows: it’s the hope that kills’.
Iain Purves will be joining the festival. Iain is a local artist and product designer and mechanical engineer . His 3d-printed work was created in response to an African music project: Afrivision, showcasing contemporary electronic music from across the African continent, with a custom graphical user interface the lights are dynamically controlled during Afrivision music nights, and this interface is now available to visitors to explore for themselves. The unconventional geometries reveal broken symmetries and digital artifacts realised in 3D-form. Additionally, the same geometries appear as realistic animated digital renderings projected in 2D, with a psychedelic and otherworldly presence. Combined, the two displays explore the possibilities of computerized and real world representation of digitally-generated geometries.
Balint Bolygo is an international artist+sculptor+designer who has recently moved to Margate. He’ll be installing his spectacular Polycycle drawing machine into the space. This will create a huge artwork 10m wide over the course of the show. We’re hoping to have some mini-sized drawing robots to experiment with in the space as well.
French artist Stéphane Trois Carrés will be showing an installation called Offset – an immersive open source video game. The structure of the game becomes a psychedelic journey in which the walls, architecture, furniture and vehicles are drawn from the artists world. Stéphane is a painter, video artist and Professor in charge of Media department in Upper Normandy College of Art ESADHAR as well as lecturer at Media and Technology Master IMAC, at Université Paris Est de Marne. He is working closely with The Margate School on this project.
Local artist and model maker Corinna Lewis will be adding her Arduino-driven warped fairy-tales into the show. We met Corinna at some workshops we ran with Open Schoool East where she created an electronic tableau : mother stirring her daughter’s brains with a big spoon.
We’ll be screening Svetlana Ochkovskaya‘s wonderfully weird “I am not myself” throughout the festival.
Multitalented Zachary Aghaizu will be opening up the Algorave night with an ambient electronic soulful set on the 24th October (see above for other bands). Also on show throughout will be a projector installation symbolising a man rising out of despair – “a reminder of how difficult it is to know whether someone is delving into trouble or rising out of it with only one perspective and encounter”.
Lee Berwick is a sonic artist working in many different mediums including performance, energetics and visual art but sonics is his first love. Lee will be showing his latest short film Bloody Frogs on the Exploding Cinema night (19th Oct see above) and also running a multi-channel frog sound installation upstairs for one night only. Military paranoia, invasion, Brexit, frogs and a stroll through Kent. Should be full on.
‘We Need Us’ is a living artwork, powered by people and data. It is an online, animation that draws data from the activities of citizen science project Zooniverse, to create sounds and shapes. Julie Freeman works with international organisations to make art science projects which explore data. She lives in Margate.
Moshing – Bitcoinsv drawings and animations 2019.
Giotto – Satoshi Vision – CSW AKA Mr Nakamoto signed Bitcoin white paper
From Monday 21st to Friday 25th we’ll be delivering free creative coding workshops between 1-2pm each day. These are suitable for all ages – beginners, kids, adults, families and done on a casual first come first served basis. Afterwards from 2-4pm there will be drop-in activities. Learn to be creative with computers. Anything cool produced will be added into the show on the spot – “become digital art“.
NOW digital is supported by The Arts Council of England, Margate Festival and Dreamland. The event is organised by Genetic Moo in collaboration with The Margate School.
CONTACT US for more information about #NOWdigital [email protected]
Margate NOW is an ambitious and dynamic festival of art, events and performances and has been developed with Turner Contemporary to run parallel with the Turner Prize 2019. The Festival programme runs from 28 Sept 2019 to 12 Jan 2020.