City Reads 2011

This year City Reads will be encouraging the city to read Man Booker shortlisted novel The Long Song by Andrea Levy.

City Reads is an annual citywide reading initiative which aims to spread a love of books and ideas to the widest possible audience throughout Brighton & Hove. The project is run by Collected Works: a Reader Development agency based in Brighton. The concept is simple: selecting one book by one author for the whole community to read, discuss, debate and creatively engage with in a series of special events, workshops and performances.

http://cityreads.co.uk/

James Cauty’s A RIOT IN A JAM JAR at Ink_d Gallery

James Cauty’s A RIOT IN A JAM JAR is an ongoing series of sculptural and graphic works that seek to exploit and commemorate real and imagined riotous events.

The riots in jam jars are 1:87 scale models, all exquisitely constructed and hand painted using traditional model making techniques, and then exhibited in jam jars.

For this exhibition Ink_d Gallery have specially commissioned a small series of new jam jar pieces and an exclusive range of reverse engineered collages. Also on show will be some larger pieces known as Industrial Scale Small World Re-Enactments and various editions including a new full colour book.

www.ink-d.co.uk

Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival

The Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival is the largest festival of its kind in the south of England, running for 10 days every April and throughout the entire month of September.

With local producers, growers, restaurants, bars and food retailers firmly at it’s heart, it’s a showcase of the fantastic food, drink and hospitality to be found in the city and surrounding Sussex.

“As comprehensive a festival as you will find in the UK this summer, this month-long homage to Brighton, Hove and the wider Sussex food scene takes in pretty much every taste-related activity you could think of… For foodies who like to keep it local, the Big Sussex Market, which attracted over 40,000 people last year, is a shopping experience without parallel. Best start saving.” – The Guardian ‘Word of Mouth’, May 2011

http://blog.brightonfoodfestival.com

SOLAR SYSTEMS An exhibition by Semiconductor

Solar Systems is a major exhibition by leading Brighton based digital artists and filmmakers, Semiconductor. It is curated by Lighthouse, in partnership with Phoenix Brighton, for Brighton Digital Festival.

Semiconductor examine our physical environment, using science and digital craft to create artworks that question our place in the natural world.

Solar Systems is their first major exhibition in the South East for four years. It draws together three recent installations that explore our relationship with the Sun.  The three works use different technologies – photography, satellites, and CGI – to observe the interactions between our nearest star and the Earth.

Heliocentric is a stunning single channel digital video installation made from time-lapse photography and astronomical tracking of the Sun’s trajectory across a series of landscapes. The highly acclaimed Black Rain uses images collected by the solar satellite STEREO, which studies the solar wind and the Sun’s coronal mass ejections, as they head towards Earth.  The rarely seen Out of the Light is a time-based sculpture which shows how celestial events, such as a solar eclipse or the transit of Venus, can reveal themselves through the play of light and shadow.

These works are emblematic of the artists’ ongoing investigation of the natural world, which has resulted in major works on astronomy (Brilliant Noise, 2006), and geology (Worlds in the Making, 2011).  Their unique approach has won them fellowships and residencies in significant scientific locations such as NASA’s Space Sciences Lab, the Galapagos Islands and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Their work is part of several international public collections and has been exhibited globally including Venice Biennale, The Royal Academy, Hirshhorn Museum, BBC, ICA and the Exploratorium.

PHOENIX BRIGHTON

10 – 14 Waterloo Pl. 
Brighton BN2 9NB
 • 01273 603700 
 • www.phoenixbrighton.org

http://brightondigitalfestival.co.uk

Brighton Digital Festival at Brighton Dome

Brighton Dome has been the centre of a number of digital conferences with previous clients including Clearleft, Wired Sussex and Microsoft. Now to mark Brighton’s status as the leading digital conference destination, Brighton Dome is at the heart of a month-long Digital Festival taking place in September, coordinated by Lighthouse, which features five iconic digital conferences: dConstruct, Update, Improving Reality, Flash on the Beach and Maker Faire.

With five spaces under one roof – the Concert Hall, the Corn Exchange, Foyer Bar, Founders Room and the Pavilion Theatre – Brighton Dome is one of the most versatile and stylish venues in the South. Built for the Prince of Wales (who became George IV) and steeped in Regency history, Brighton Dome combines state-of-the-art facilities and unrivalled in-house expertise with Grade 1 listed heritage. Able to cater for intimate meetings and events of between 20 – 80 people, the venue can also accommodate larger conferences and events of up to 1742 people.

dConstruct
2 SEPTEMBER
An annual, internationally renowned conference that gathers many of the brightest minds in the design community to explore big issues in the digital world. This year, speakers including Kevin Slavin, Don Norman, Stephanie Rieger and Matthew Sheret explore how we can bridge the gap between physical and digital product design.
2011.dconstruct.org

Maker Faire
3 September
Join makers, crafters and inventors and interact with fascinating creations, home-spun robotics, garden shed inventions, circuit boards and the occasional fireball. Learn to solder or make a musical instrument at this hands-on day of creative invention and technological discovery for all ages.
makerfairebrighton.com/makers

Update
5 SEPTEMBER
Update is a one-day conference exploring the hottest topics in mobile design and development. Curated by user experience designer and developer Aral Balkan, Update features inspiring talks from top names from the worlds of iOS, web, and user experience including Brendan Dawes, Jeremy Keith, Sarah Parmenter, Matt Gemmell, Jeff LaMarche, and Cennydd Bowles. Their inspirational keynote sessions are punctuated by lively geek ninja battles debating platforms and technologies, and the conference day itself is followed by two days of hands-on workshops on topics ranging from iOS design to HTML5 for mobile. Update’s special guest this year is Ronald Wayne. He founded Apple alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, created the first Apple logo, and wrote the manual for the first Apple computer. He then gave up his 10% share in Apple for just $2,300. If he’d kept it, it would be worth over $30 billion today and would make him one of the world’s 15 richest people.
updateconf.com/

Flash on the Beach
11-14 September
Flash on the Beach is a major international conference, and a highlight of Brighton’s digital culture calendar. It brings designers and developers together to share, educate and inspire. This year’s speakers include Joshua Davis and Ben Fry, who create stunning artworks using digital visual languages.
flashonthebeach.com

Improving Reality
23 SEPTEMBER
Improving Reality is a conference curated by Lighthouse that explores how digital artists and designers are radically re-engineering our world. Thinkers and makers from the technology, film, education and art worlds will explore how the current generation of makers is not only attempting to augment reality, but go one step further, and actually improve reality. It features artists, Julian Oliver, Blast Theory and Agency of Coney, gaming guru and founder of Makieworld, Alice Taylor, filmmaker and founder of A Swarm of Angels, Matt Hanson, user experience designer, Aral Balkan, and more.

Data is Nature
30 SEPTEMBER
A night of audio-visual delights and surprises closes the first Brighton Digital Festival.  Lighthouse is curating a brilliant line-up of audio-visual performers, including musician and artist Paul Prudence (dataisnature.com), who together will show how digital technology can help us see nature in entirely new ways.
Uxbrighton.org.uk

There’s a lot more taking place during the Brighton Digital Festival, full information is available at: brightondigitalfestival.co.uk