Alternate Realities

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Three works by international artists who use developing forms of technology to allow visitors to both be guided through, and participate in, their work will be on display at Lighthouse Brighton 11-20 Oct, 2019. 

The exhibition includes an interactive installation, a virtual reality installation, and an interactive documentary, all of which have been selected from Sheffield Doc/Fest’s 2019 Alternate Realities exhibition – a leading forum for digital non-fiction experiences from around the world.

▪   Sheffield Doc/Fest Best Digital Experience Winner Echo by Australian multi-media artist Georgie Pinn is an interactive installation that uses technology to encourage us to empathise with each other on a human level. Using touch screen, animation and facial tracking technology, Echo shows us what it’s like to see someone else blink with our eyes, smile with our lips and speak with our tongue. By travelling the world collecting, archiving and sharing human stories across gender, race, culture, and nations, Echo emphasises the commonalities we share as a species, acting as an antidote to personal loneliness and ideological isolation. Watch a trailer.

▪   Common Ground by British filmmaker Darren Emerson is a 30-min interactive Virtual Reality documentary examining the erosion of social housing and the disenfranchisement and demonisation of the working class. Set on the Aylesbury Estate in South London, currently undergoing a controversial regeneration scheme, Common Ground blends archive film, interviews, drone photography and 360-degree video to take the participant on a journey from the birth of the estate in the 1960s, through its decline and up to the present day. Common Ground has been shown at Tribeca, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Sandbox Immersive Festival in China, where it won the award for Best Immersive Storytelling. Watch a trailer.

▪  My Mother’s Kitchen by Australian-based performer, writer and producer Maeve Marsden & Tea Uglow, Creative Director for Google's Creative Lab in Sydney is an interactive documentary filled with joy and comfort; inequality and hardship. Participants are invited to share in the stories of eight LGBTQI+ individuals as they relay intimate, funny and bittersweet memories of their mother’s kitchens. The work takes the form of a bookcase filled with book-like devices and matching headphones. The viewer rolls a ball around floor plans of various homes, each space unlocking the audio.

Alternate Realities at Lighthouse is part of a national tour subsequently visiting HOME, Manchester; and Barbican, London, exhibiting highlights from the 2019 Alternate Realities digital art exhibition.