Tuesday 2 February 2010

Today's idea - Bonnie Mitchell: Interactive Installations and Experimental Animation



There's a few today depending on whether you're a digital media type, radio fan, or English geek. There's a peculiar mix of things on today in Brighton and I'm a digital media geek so this one's my favourite, I think - although they're all one-day events so I've got no prior knowledge here.

Bonnie Mitchell, digital artist and academic, is coming to Brighton today. At Lighthouse, on Kensington Street there's the chance to see her exhibition and hear some words on the matter of experimental animation and and creation of interactive art environments that "explore the concept of virtual presence and unencumbered immersion through her use of interactive media and experimental animation." ..I think I could do with a pamphlet to recap this on arrival.

Mitchell's artworks have been around internationally at a whole bunch of anagram-titled places I haven't heard of but immediately hold in revere: SIGGRAPH, SEAMUS, ICMA, ISEA, Prix Ars Electronica, Digital Salon, ArCADE, Gamut, amongst others in a giant list. There have also been awards which also involve large amounts of capital letters too.

There's some more detail below and I'm pretty much sold on the shiny-sounding bits in the last sentence.

"Over the past twenty years Mitchell has developed numerous interactive installations including Virtual Presence (1992), which used a Polaroid sonar sensor to measure the distance of a viewer to the installation, creating a pseudo-dialog between human and machine. Her recent installation 'Inhabitants' immersed the viewer in an abstract world populated with organic entities. Through the use of small handheld projection screens, the viewer caught animated elements projected from the ceiling to the floor to decipher the meaning of the piece. Many of Mitchell's installations explored the sculptural capabilities of light to form 3 dimensional spaces using abstract animation, sensors, projections, and computer programming. The installations often employed elements such as semitransparent scrims, mirrors, hundreds of fluorescent light bulbs and thousands of strands of yarn."


This is all free entry and opens at at 6:30, with the artist's talk at 7pm. Find it on Facebook here and a map here

For English geeks there's also spoken word event 'Sparks' and if you're a fan of Radio Reverb then head to Latest Music Bar where they're holding the show 'Up Yours' in front of a live audience - namely you if you attend.

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