LUMEN Prize-winning artists, Genetic Moo, Nicola Schauerman and Tim Pickup are filling The Andrew Lamont Gallery at Theatr Brycheiniog with their playful and evocative animations for an innovative digital art exhibition.
The Lumen Prize presents: Microworld Brecon is a month-long show of contemplative, generative art. There is a wonderful ambient feel to the ‘Microworld ‘ and bean bags allow the audience to sit back and contemplate the huge variety of activity going on.
During the May half-term holidays Genetic Moo invited the local community to get involved. They ran a week of coding workshops and drop-ins in the gallery and helped people of all ages (six to 75) to make their own digital artworks to be incorporated into the show.
These were great fun and over 60 locals used processing to generate creative coding animations, and built artificial life forms in Genetic Moo’s creature-building Animat program.
Each workshop produced different geometries and motions and the Animats had a selection of new muscles and springs to bring them to life. Tim and Nicola then stitched these together into five large scale projections which are spread around the gallery creating a huge ever changing Microworld.
On top of the participants’ contributions, Genetic Moo added some small scale micro-organisms of their own; water-fleas, cockroaches, coral and the like. With hundreds of moving parts they started to think of this piece as a single entity which they are now calling Superorganism.
After a big effort to get all these elements together, the opening event at the end of the week was a charming night with real interest from the Brecon crowd.
The show runs for the month and there has already been a lot of interest with the workshop participants coming back to see how their creations were incorporated.
The Lumen Prize for Digital Art, founded by Llangasty resident Carla Rapoport, exists to celebrate the very best art created with technology and has curated 40 exhibitions in 13 countries.
Genetic Moo is a collaboration between artists Nicola Schauerman and Tim Pickup, who won the 2013 Lumen Founder’s Award. They are based in Margate but work all over the UK and abroad with digital arts organisations, and are members of the arts collective The London Group. Tim and Nicola describe their work as “living installations in pixels and light”. The Usk River Trust also enabled this exhibition to come to Brecon and work with the community.
The Lumen Prize presents: Microworld Brecon runs at the Andrew Lamont Gallery, Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon, until June 24.