Theatrical innovators Chronic Insanity will launch their first data-driven digital art and performance festival, Puncture The Screen; a two-day online event championing digital creative culture. Platforming new and visually stimulating content, the festival aims to exhibit the best in digital creativity alongside industry-led workshops, with networking and educational opportunities to support artists in honing their craft to create their own digital masterpieces.
Puncture The Screen will celebrate the work of artists new to digital creation in theatre and performance. Blurring the lines between theatre, film, music, visual and audio art, creative coding, and video games, the works commissioned by the festival will offer an unusual and unique experience.
The digital sphere has created a new way for artists to continue to make, grow and expand their practice beyond venue walls, however the connection between audience and performer remains harder to obtain online. Chronic Insanity seek to navigate this by utilising audience data to produce a uniquely customised performance each time, crafting a connection through the personalisation. The festival aims to provide the tools and knowledge for others to enhance their digital performances in a similar fashion, puncturing the screen and connecting audience with artist.
Digital Producer Joe Strickland comments, We really want this festival to show the full innovative strength of digital art and performance. We want to show off its accessibility, its sustainability, and its affordability for both creatives and audiences alike. Digital Theatre saved us this past year, and the future of the arts is in part digital, so we’re keen to keep supporting and creating as much digital art and performance as possible. Puncture The Screen is going to help us support other artists, performers, and creatives from a wide range of backgrounds with our commissions, how-to videos, panels, and workshops. We want people to leave the festival feeling inspired and confident in their ability to create work in this exciting, new, opportunity-filled medium.
Following an open call out for creatives to showcase their work in the festival, Chronic Insanity have curated an innovative and diverse line-up of events. The works exhibited as part of Puncture The Screen include:
The Next Best Thing by Emily Holyoake/Chronic Insanity
Measuring the audience’s personality to create personalised routes through a dystopian story, The Next Best Thing is an interactive visual novel about finding your place in a confusing world.
message not sent by YESYESNONO
One question, numerous answers: “What’s the one thing you regret never having told someone?” message not sent is a durational streamed performance about regret, loneliness, and the things we never had a chance to say.
The Ashes World Tour by Naomi Westerman/Little but Fierce
A multi-modal digital art project, The Ashes World Tour, combines digital data with audio-visual content, and written text from an award-winning playwright, to explore themes of death, grief, gender-based death rates, communal grieving rituals worldwide, and the importance of memory.
Creative coding and post-classical piano by Larkhall
The performance sees algorithms react in real-time to live piano compositions, creating vivid imagery unique to every performance. Witness art that listens, and then paints itself alongside beautiful music.
Augmented Art by Tom Shennan
Blurring the lines between the artist’s and AI’s intentions, Augmented Art, uses a disinterested AI as a collaborator in the process of creating intensely personal videos exploring identity and neurodiversity.
Displacement Native by Michael-Jon Mizra
The performance finds innovative ways to represent data concerning the migrant crisis and demonisation of Islam, using it to degrade and contort audio and visual works.
Puncture The Screen Runs Thursday 29th – Friday 30th July 2021. Following the initial launch, Puncture The Screen will be made available to access on demand until Friday 13th August. Tickets are on sale here
