Over 3000 visitors to this 10-day festival celebrating creative uses of computers and technology.
.
We opened the doors of The Margate School on Margate High Street over the October 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 which is running in parallel with the Turner Prize over at the Turner Contemporary and has been spreading the excitement around the town and continues on until January.
As organisers we’d like to thank all the artists and makers involved for making it such a vibrant success. The festival was arranged with different activities each day. We’ll be putting together fuller documentation, vidoes and Flickr over the next few days – for now here is a brief snapshot of the different events and workshops day by day.
Thanks
Nicola + Tim,
Genetic Moo
Full Flickr photo set can be accessed here
Show stopping 10m wide drawing machine by Balint Bolygo local artist and engineer. This intensified in depth day by day.
Resident artist Matt Mapleston lived in a dome all week engineering LEDs 3d prints and a robot playing Ukelele machine.
Exploding Cinema brought their expanded cinema DIY open access cinema to the space on Saturday night with digital film making workshops all day.
On Monday other mini residencies started with Dan Thompson investigating a previous Thanet technological takeover gathering information on Redifusion.
Jon Hislop got his week long project going with the Steamettes – girls into electronics, coding and engineering
Tuesday was video game day with Nick Thompson and the Micro Museum filling the space with 80s consoles, a gibbering robot compere and reams of old school 8-bit classics.
Also on Tuesday our LA visitor Gretchen Andrew held an intricate conversation with Dr Dan Strutt about her attempted online takeover of the Turner Prize.
Thursday night was ALGORAVE etc with a mixture of experimental electronics including Zachary Aghaizu’s soulful electrosonics
And closing with live-coding sets. 10 performers covering all bases in cutting edge audio.
On Friday local artist SaraSara popped into the space to do an impromptu interactive musical installation …
… helped by the Steamettes.
Saturday was electronics day with mini light sensitive boat building workshops by Rocio von Jungenfeld from University of Kent.
And Martin Tanton getting his modular synths to respond to laptop webcam input.
The festival finished off with a late night Cinesthetic Party with live music, archive footage and
liquid light presentations…
and a last day film show with cake and tea. Thanks to the Margate Film Festival for hosting these closing events.
At the end of 10 days, the electronic counter on the door said 3000 visitors and given that it was above kids head height and there were hundreds of them engaging with digital art in all its forms we were really happy with the overall turnout and the efforts everyone put into the festival.
To see the list of all the artists and makers involved (and there were dozens, many not mentioned here) go to www.geneticmoo.com/now-digital
This event was part of Margate NOW, an ambitious and dynamic festival of art, events and performances. This year, in response to Turner Prize 2019 at Turner Contemporary the programme runs from 28 September 2019 – 12 January 2020. It has been developed by Turner Contemporary, Margate Festival, Open School East, 1927, Resort, Crate, Limbo, Dreamland Margate, Kent County Council and Kent Libraries, Thanet District Council, Southeastern and locally based artists. It is supported by Arts Council England through National Lottery funding, as well as contributions from Kent County Council, Thanet District Council and Dreamland Margate. Turner Prize 2019 is organised in collaboration with Tate.