About Lighthouse | Challenges for Residents
About
Lighthouse is a digital culture agency based in Brighton. We support, commission and exhibit work by artists and filmmakers, and create vibrant, inspirational programmes that show how important artists and filmmakers are in a changing media landscape. We work with digital art and moving image, which we present in our own venue and beyond, nationally and internationally. By supporting artists and filmmakers, through commissioning, exhibition and professional development, we provide a platform for digital artists and creators to demonstrate that digital culture is about more than technology and tools; it is about ideas, emotion, learning, and aesthetics.
Lighthouse also runs the UK’s leading mentoring programme for filmmakers – Guiding Lights – which supports rising film talent by connecting them with some of the industry’s biggest names, including Sam Mendes, Alex Garland, Nick Hornby and Barbara Broccoli.
Some of our projects over the past year have included:
- Invisible Fields, a major international exhibition exploring the radio spectrum at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona Spain, featuring over a dozen internationally known artists, designers and scientists, including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Joyce Hinterding.
- Four short films commissioned in partnership with the BBC, which received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations
- Laboratory Life, a unique, interactive art-science laboratory, where 21 artists, scientists and doctors used biomedical science to create new art works. The artworks created at Laboratory Life recently toured to Hong Kong.
- Exhibitions by Turner Prize nominated artist, Kutlug Ataman; and Australian artist, Lynette Wallworth, exhibited at Brighton Festival.
- Lives at War, an online game made for young people, which animates the dramatic history of World War II.
Lighthouse is also a vibrant venue for events in Brighton. Our venue is a former printworks, located in the heart of Brighton’s North Laine, the city’s vibrant cultural quarter. We host a wide range of events, from our own exhibitions, talks and screenings, to commercial conferences, seminars, away days and receptions.
We have five tenants within our office suites, all of whom work within the creative industries:
- Clearleft, a world-class team of designers and creative technologists specialising in user experience
- Culture24, cultural digital publishers, who work across the arts, heritage, education and tourism sectors
- Liquid Light, an award winning web design agency.
- Mind Orchard, a digital agency creating interactive content, games, websites, animations and apps.
- South East Dance, a national dance development organisation.
We have identified the following as areas we would like to explore further through the Happenstance residencies:- How can we share our understanding of digital culture more fluidly within our organisation?
– How we make our existing work more engaging online, without necessitating more work from us? And what are some of the most effective strategies for archiving previous work?
– How can digital technology augment and enrich our venue, making the programmes we present outside the building more visible, within it?
– Are their aspects of digital practice – for instance, hacking, coding, critical engineering, post-digital objects, critical design – that we could be exploring better within our artistic and education programmes?
– Now that we have taken on the management of the BFI’s short film fund, how can we use digital tools to streamline the application process for filmmakers?
– Can we make the process of creating an artwork visible? Are there ways we can use digital tools to bring the public to closer to the process?
– Can our website be a place where parts of our artistic programme happens, rather than mainly sign-posting our audiences to our offline programmes?