Get interactive with Leeds Beckett students at city’s digital festival

On Tuesday 26 April, from 3.30pm to 8pm in Millennium Square, students from a range of courses across the School of Computing, Creative Technologies and Engineering, and the School of Art, Architecture and Design, will present Test Tube, a live, interactive performance of visuals and music projected onto the Big Screen.

The students will create experimental and abstract visuals using everyday objects, light reflections and filters alongside music, which will be produced live on a laptop. Members of the public can interact with the workshop, by creating their own visuals or stepping into an effect camera feed to see an altered image of themselves on the Big Screen in Millennium Square. The event is free and open to all. For more information please contact Gemma Povey at g.povey@leedsbeckett.ac.uk.

Ashley Dean, Senior Lecturer in Broadcast Media Technologies, explained: “Test Tube is an extra-curricular outlet for students interested in experimental film-making, electronic music, and live collaborative performance. Through a series of diverse workshops throughout 2016, the group have been producing innovative imagery to be projected and recreated live on Millennium Square as the first public event; Test Tube #1. We will be joined by a diverse range of electronic musicians who will collaborate to form brand new and original Audio / Visual work. 

“The students involved have benefitted from cross-course collaboration which opens up their practices to new perspectives and partnerships. ‘Test Tube’ allows tutors to demonstrate and develop areas of their practice that doesn’t yet fit into their curricula, which gives students an opportunity to see them work in a new light and work as equals through collaboration. The work has the potential to be used as research and broadcast further through festivals and forums.”

On Friday 29 April, from 5pm to 8pm, the Project Something exhibition will launch at an event, open to all, within the ground floor art space at Leeds Beckett’s Broadcasting Place on Woodhouse Lane. Project Something is a collaboration between Benjamin Hall and Jonathan Briggs, Senior Lecturers in Graphic Arts and Design, and current Masters by Research students, at Leeds Beckett.

The exhibition, which will then be open to the public from Monday 2 to Thursday 5 May, 9am to 5pm, explores location, chance and storytelling within a post-digital landscape.

Benjamin explained: “Our exhibition brings together work that is at odds: global and local, digital and analogue, virtual and actual, static and dynamic, overlapping to recreate what is neither here (nor there). It features a series of engines that aim to generate stories dynamically, harvesting data from what's (sometimes only just) expired. Jonathan and I share an interest in the narrative and narrative-less-ness of post-digital data and in presenting this in a new, visually interpretable format. Project Something will be a wholly interactive work allowing for contributions by the public which will inform and influence an on-going, non-linear narrative.”

For more information, please visit: http://projectsomething.co.uk/.

Dr Nick Cope, Associate Dean Enterprise and Employability in the University’s Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology, commented: “The Leeds Digital Festival offers our students a great opportunity to engage with the digital community across the city.  It is also an opportunity for some of our students and staff to showcase their talent and expertise.”

Additionally, on Wednesday 27 April, Leeds Beckett University will host the Digital Innovation in Healthcare Showcase in collaboration with industry partners from 4.30pm to 6.30pm in its Clinical Skills Suite in the City Campus Portland Building.

The showcase brings together speakers from a variety of digital innovation for healthcare perspectives, including IBM Watson and Current Care, and will see the University’s Clinical Skills Suite transformed into a ‘smart house’ to demonstrate the latest technology being used to promote independence in the home.

Chris Hudson, Associate Dean Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of Health and Social Science at Leeds Beckett, said: “Digital technologies are transforming healthcare, and Leeds Beckett University is actively working in this area with exciting research and partnerships taking place across all areas of health, computing technology and enterprise.  Events such as this one are an excellent opportunity to hear about some of the innovative ideas emerging, and to network between academic innovation and industry enterprise. The event will be held in our state of the art Clinical Skills Suite so is a chance to see how this is used to aid innovative practice in healthcare.”

The event is free to attend. Please register your place in advance at http://bit.ly/HealthcareShowcase.

The Leeds Digital Festival is a multi-venue, city-wide festival celebrating digital culture in all its forms, which will take place from Monday 25 to Friday 29 April 2016.