A futuristic festival that i-DAT helped to found, takes place at the National Space Centre this autumn.
Fulldome UK 2014 takes place on November 7 & 8 and offers 2 days of inspirational screenings, live VJ performances, radical debates and forward-thinking visions in sound and image.
The event takes place at the National Space Centre in Leicester and is open to the public. Tickets are available online here: www.fulldome.org.uk/tickets
Visitors can expect to see ‘fulldome art’ – an emergent artform using immersive environments and digital technologies to push the boundaries of artistic practice. International and UK fulldome film-makers, audio researchers and programmers will display their works at the event.
Fulldome works can be linear and non-linear, produced or generative, interactive and performative experiences projected onto the ‘full’ domed surface traditionally found in planetaria.
This makes for a highly immersive audience experience, challenging established models of cinema and gallery spaces.
Fulldome UK 2014 will host work by the following, and many more:

• 1024 architecture (France)
• Former Anti VJ Joanie Lemercier (France)
• RFID (UK)
• Maotik & Fraction (Canada)
• January Zehn and Stefan Berke (Germany)
• Bordos.ArtWorks (Hungary)
• Glowing Bulbs (Hungary)
• United VJs (Brazil)
• Addictive TV (UK)

The festival – co-founded by i-DAT – is in its 4^th year, and is run by a not-for-profit association that supports artists and researchers working within fulldome immersive environments including i-DAT’s Professor Mike Phillips, GaiaNova, The Computer Arts Society (CAS) and the National Space Centre (NSC) through NSC Creative.
“We’re defining the emergent artform of fulldome art with collaborations with the world’s leading performers, projection mapping experts and VJs. It’s super-cool”, said Mike.
i-DAT is awaiting news on Arts Council England funding for staging Fulldome UK 2014 in Leicester.
Previous festival action happened in August at Kendal Calling. Fulldome UK curated a cross-section of some of its best immersive audio-visual short fulldome films to support a playback of the ground breaking fulldome album The Search Engine by Ninja Tunes artist DJ Food – making its UK music festival premier. There were also lectures that flew festival-goers through the Universe and beyond the stars!
Back in June and July i-DAT hosted a week-long E/M/D/L fulldome prototyping workshop in Plymouth, inviting international participants to experiment with the platform.
The artistic research that took place during the workshop was in the areas of projection mapping, performance and interactivity “contributing to a redefinition of fulldome art,” said Mike Phillips.
i-DAT is the UK partner of E/M/D/L – The European Mobile Dome Lab for Artistic Research – an international collaboration awarded €400k by the EU Culture Programme.
E/M/D/L is a network for the exchange of artistic and technological expertise within the full-dome medium. The partnership connects four European and three Canadian institutions and cultural partners, all leaders in this field, sharing and expanding skills, methodologies, strategies and content.
The project began in February this year and by September 2015, there will have been eight residencies and public presentations in five countries, using a mobile domic architectural structure equipped with cutting-edge technologies.
E/M/D/L will climax with a series of performances at the world’s most sophisticated virtual theatre, the Satosphere in Montreal, Canada.
Partners in E/M/D/L include i-DAT, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, the Trans-Media Academy Hellerau/CYNETART Festival in Dresden, Germany, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, the Society for Arts and Technology and kondition pluriel in Montréal, Canada, and LANTISS (Laboratoire des Nouvelles Technologies de l’Image, du Son et de la Scène)/Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada.