Digital Arts Festival: Uncovering careers in the creative sector

We welcomed crowds of excited students and their teachers to our Colchester Campus as part our Digital Arts Festival.

The Employability and Careers team in the Faculty of Humanities worked with the University’s Outreach team to create an exciting programme of activities and interactive displays building on our links with the region’s creative sector.

As part of the festival our Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall hosted a multisensory experience zone decorated with interactive artwork brought to us by local digital artists, including:

• Rituals, a 2 part installation, comprising of a virtual reality experience, running on an HTC Vive and an augmented reality app via a mobile device by Sian Fan.
• TEO an innovative interactive artwork that uses A.I facial detection & expression recognition to animate virtual avatars, from artists Barbara Dougan and Henry Driver.
• Pyrit Deck from freelance artist and writer, Laura Trevail. Laura makes things that move about, and things that threaten to do so when they probably shouldn't.
• MaoMaoCastle, a high-speed game featuring a magical flying Cat-Dragon developed by AsobiTech.

Colchester and Ipswich Museums also attended with an interactive display.

Speaking on Twitter, artist Laura Trevail said “Thank you for inviting me! You have a really stunning campus, unique energy, and a fierce pursuit of future talent and work, welcoming schools and artists to engage. And big up to the fantastic Student Ambassadors for their work throughout the day. Much respect, all.”

The festival also encouraged students to take part in digital workshops and ask questions at a Careers Corner where they could ask questions about careers in the digital arts sector with representatives from our Employability and Careers Centre, Colchester Institute, apprenticeship specialist QA, the Essex Employment and Skills Board, the Young Creative Council, Creative and Cultural Skills and the Mercury Theatre.

There were also a few surprises along the way; colourless skittles, a textured enormo board and a create your own GIF competition.

The festival was a great success and our Outreach team are already busy planning next year’s event.