Brighton’s Digital Festival kicks off this week with a wealth of events from University of Sussex staff and students.
From 3D holograms and archiving workshops, to immersive performances and exhibitions, the festival is a month-long exploration of digital culture, highlighting the ways in which digital technology shapes our everyday lives and thinking.
Events will be held in various venues across the city as well as further afield including on campus, with the Sussex Humanities Lab partnering with the festival for the Messy Edge conference on 28 September. Exploring the social, cultural and political implications of technology, the conference will be held at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, with talks from artists and activists as well as Dr Sharon Webb, Lecturer in Digital Humanities, and research student Irene Fubara-Manuel.
Sussex Humanities Lab Director, Professor Caroline Bassett, said: "The Messy Edge is a brilliant platform for a diverse range of speakers to challenge dominant perspectives on the cultural and political impacts of technology, and links academic thinking, the arts, activists and the public. It's a conference for all, and we're proud to support it."
Dr Webb will be speaking about the work she’s doing to reanimate the Queer in Brighton oral archive, running a workshop about archiving in October.
Irene Fubara-Manuel, who is currently concluding her doctorate in Creative and Critical Practice, will talk about her workshop Dreams of Disguise, which contains user-friendly 3D software to provide a radical imagination of virtual spaces that symbolise participants’ dreams and memories of disguise.
A number of academics from the Sussex Humanities Lab will be taking part in the Brighton Digital Festival but they are also supporting a number of external artists and community associates, including artist Chisato Minamura, who used the lab to prepare work for her performance ‘Scored in Silence’.
Other academics involved in the Festival include Professor of Poetics, Keston Sutherland, who has partnered with an artist to create an exhibition called Moral Sympathies, and Danny Bright, Lecturer in Music and Music Technology, who has composed the music to accompany a signed performance about the deaf survivors of the Atomic bombs that fell in Japan in 1945.
Newhaven Fort will play host to a sound project by Dr Alice Eldridge, Lecturer in Music and Music Technology, and Dr Chris Kiefer, Lecturer in Music Technology, as well as an installation by Dr Cecile Chevalier, Lecturer in Media Practice, also with Dr Kiefer, which streams sound from the real and virtual sonic environments.
Sussex Innovation Centre are also involved in the festival, hosting a 'hackathon' to honour Ada Lovelace day and challenging teams of developers, creatives, freelancers, students and researchers to find and design innovative solutions to various challenges.