This year's Interact'19 exhibition has finished with a great live event at the LCB Depot in Leicester. I organised the first exhibition of Leicester-based digital artists in 2014 as part of the five-year celebrations of the opening of the LCB Depot. The show went well, but I hadn't intended to make it a regular event. However, in 2018 there was an opportunity to organise something similar and it seemed like a good idea to organise another one in 2019. I think it's fair to say that it will now be an annual fixture :) Full details of this year's exhibition, together with pictures from the live ..read more

On Saturday 19th of October at Phoenix in Leicester, there was a showcase of local Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality producers that featured work by MBD, NSC Creative, DMU Institute of Creative Technologies, CATS are not PEAS and Ben Fredericks. The showcase demonstrated the wealth of VR talent in Leicester and I think we can justifiably say that the city is something of a Virtual Reality hotspot. What's more, the type of work being produced is interesting, with a strong emphasis on narrative and performative work. As part of a short discussion after the showcase, I spoke a bit about the ..read more

Today a new video-installation went live at DeMontfort University on the front of the Vijay Patel building. The Pixel Wall comes with an editor that you open by scanning the on-screen QR code on your mobile phone. You can then draw your own video game sprite and add it to the screen for others to see. It's a simple idea and intended to be a fun part of the One Giant Leap celebration of the moon-landings that's happening in Leicester this week. However, for me, it marks an important step in testing and finalising the release of my artThings technology. artThings emerged from my PhD research a ..read more

Event Two at the Royal College of Art took place between 12th and 17th July 2019 and was a great success. Every evening event was fully booked and day visitors numbered many hundreds. We are still sorting for through the documentation gathered at the event but have managed to sort through the first set of photographs. You can find around 350 in an album on Flickr. Additionally, there are pictures of the install, plus videos, 3D photographs and 360 panoramas on the Event Two web page. An updated version of The CAS50 Collection is currently in production. This will contain information about th ..read more

As part of my roles as an International Professor at Guangdong University of Technology (GDUT) and a member of the EVA London programme committee, I helped put together a number of China-related activities at the EVA London conference in July this year. This included chairing a panel of China-related papers at the conference, followed by an evening panel session and a small exhibition. I was joined at the conference by GDUT colleague Yi Ji (pictured) and four students from the University. Pictures from the activities can be seen on the FE Art Lab web page. If you are interested in knowing mo ..read more

I'm back from my latest month (my fifth in total) of teaching at Guangdong University of Technology School of Art and Design in China. Since it was the last session in this contract (I'll probably sign up to do more). I thought it was time for some reflection.When I did the first session in April 2017, I didn't know what to expect. I was asked to teach "creative programming" to people who had not programmed before. My initial concerns were not just with programming languages to use but also with the human ones. How would the workshop work with people who I didn't share a first language? I also ..read more

Saturday 9th March saw Leicester's regular Create-a-con event at the LCB Depot. Among the exhibitors were Leicester Hackspace, R10 Music Collective and Interact Digital Arts. I was showing off some work in progress made using artThings technology. There was the large "LOL" light piece in the LCD Depot window; the connected "Colloquy" 3D printed works I last showed at In The Dark; and some new work that uses artThings to allow you to use your mobile phone as a controller for a big-screen video game.This last piece is based around technology I have developed to allow people to interact with digi ..read more

I've finally completed the documentation for the East Meets West: Innovation connections exhibition that I co-curated in Guangzhou, China, in November 2018. The updated web page contains information about the artworks shown together with a PDF of the exhibition catalogue and pictures of the workshops and the exhibition itself.http://interactdigitalarts.uk/innovationconnections ..read more

Last year I was asked to produce a lighting display for the main cafe window at the LCB Depot in Leicester to be installed throughout December. After working through a number of ideas, I settled on something that I call Lots of Lights, or "LOL". LOL consists of 20 internet-connected micro-controllers, each connected to a string of 50 bright LED lights. The resulting 1,000 LEDs can be made to play patterns, such as fades and chases, via an associated web application.The lights were installed in the LCB cafe window to coincide with the Interact'18 exhibition and remained live for around six week ..read more

The Interact'18 exhibition took place between 7th and 21st December 2018 at the LCB Depot Lightbox gallery. The show featured work by digital artists associated with Leicester - James Chantry, Andrew Johnston, Thierry Miquel, Joe Moran, Ernest Edmonds, Fabrizio Poltonieri, Anoushka Goodwin, Leila Houston, Michele Witthaus & Paul Rudman, Yi Ji, Alice Tuppen-Corps, Dave Everitt & Fania Raczinski, Peter Flint, Askokkumar Mistry and myself.The aims of the exhibition were, first, show the full range of digital artwork produced in the city and, second, to introduce artists who may not have m ..read more