One of the high­lights of liv­ing in Brighton is the amount of cre­ative out­put in the city, along­side the huge amount of tech that goes on here. Com­bin­ing both of these is the Brighton Dig­i­tal Fes­ti­val. This year between 13th Sep­tem­ber and 13th Octo­ber 2018.

I went along to the open­ing on Thurs­day 13th at Phoenix. This includes the work for the Lumen prize exhi­bi­tion Uncom­mon Natures. My high­lights from this includes Degen­er­a­tive Cul­tures by Cesar and Lois, which involves fun­gus grow­ing inside books about the nature of human­i­ty, and then turn­ing this into a dig­i­tal fun­gus, which is read­ing the same book and degen­er­at­ing it. You can see an out­put of this on the projects twit­ter feed @hellofungus.

Anoth­er part of this exhi­bi­tion involved Wind­socks that (I think) mea­sured the wind in dif­fer­ent city loca­tions and brought them into the space, oper­at­ing as a kind of telep­res­ence. Its all very fas­ci­nat­ing, though dur­ing the open­ing speech­es they did keep bump­ing into people.

Along­side this exhi­bi­tion is the cel­e­bra­tion of the Com­put­er Arts Soci­ety 50th Year. This includes work by Roger Saun­ders, demon­strat­ing some of the very ear­ly com­put­er art involv­ing char­ac­ter maps, very rem­i­nis­cent of ascii art today. He even had designs for his own design and art pro­gram­ming lan­guage PLAD, which after talk­ing to him may be get­ting port­ed to run on a Rasp­ber­ry PI. It looked a bit like pro­cess­ing, which is a design lan­guage I have used in the past for art projects, and I liked the approach of mount­ing source code to the wall, and approach I took at my RCA DI Exhibition.

Amongst the oth­er events I’m most look­ing for­ward to, which is tonight (15th Sep­tem­ber) is Bring Your Own Beam­er, where artists take over a space, (The Old Mar­ket in Brighton) and project on the walls. Theres always some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing. My favourite pieces of the past where a 4 play­er Pac­man (3 play­ing ghosts) played on and pro­ject­ed inside a balloon.

There will be shows through­out the month, the hard work of many artists, design­ers and devel­op­ers. I should know as in 2014 and 15 I worked on 2 events!

The full cal­en­dar is on the Brighton Dig­i­tal Fes­ti­val Web­site and the Hash­tag is #BDF18.