Bath Spa University has teamed up with Bath Digital Festival to provide ten days of exciting events at venues across the city from Thursday 14th to Sunday 24th March.
Bath has a fast-growing digital sector and the Festival has been developed to allow members of the public to explore the city’s thriving digital scene and to get involved in a variety of interesting projects. The mixture of events offers something for everyone in the community.
Innovative research is being carried out at Bath Spa and cutting-edge digital enterprises are choosing the city as their home, so Bath has a lot to celebrate and is fast being recognised as a leading digital hub.
Many of Bath Spa’s staff and students are heavily involved with the running of the festival, including:
- Katharine Reeve (Acting Head of Department in Creative Writing and Publishing) who is running a social media workshop with senior lecturer Mike Johnston, and also a digital school magazine workshop for teenagers with staff and 2nd and 3rd year students from the undergraduate Publishing course.
- The Social Media Experiment (SME) team (run by Katharine Reeve with Mike Johnston) will promote the festival digitally through the use of Twitter, Facebook, blogs/articles, filming, interviews and YouTube.
- Another student team from SME is looking after the educational side of the festival, utilising social media and producing written and legacy content for educational purposes.
Katharine Reeve said: “The Digital Publishing students who work on the Social Media Experiment have been given some wonderful opportunities to create digital content across media and platforms for this important digital festival, which celebrates the city of Bath’s expertise in this area.”
David Kelly, Festival Director, added: “Our second Festival promises to be a fantastic celebration of the very best of the region’s digital activity. We have events for everyone, from a family weekend with a digital funfair to a hack at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios.”
One of the headline events is Anthony Head’s Digitrope, the result of collaboration between Bath Spa University, Illuminate Bath and Bath Digital Festival.
Anthony Head is the Creative Director of the Illuminate Bath festival and Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University. The Digitrope is new artwork, created especially for the Bath Digital Festival. It is an interactive, participatory linear zoetrope (a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures) which will be projected on the Roman Baths in Stall Street on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th March.
Members of the public are invited to come along and be teleported into the Digitrope, by standing in front of the camera and performing for a few seconds. They then watch a 20 metre wide projection, showing their time-delayed image along the Digitrope’s nine two-metre high windows. Just like watching a 19th century zoetrope, but with a 21st century digital twist!
Anthony Head said: “It’s great to have the opportunity to create a new projected work for Bath Digital Festival. Following my personal passion for digital interactivity, this participatory artwork should bring many smiles to people as they experience it for themselves. The act of seeing yourself patterned by the rhythm of time-delayed moving image is uncanny and engaging. You just need to relax and have a go at it yourself.”
