London Group members Genetic Moo will be showing their massive projection in the old Woolworths building as part of Margate Festival this month.
Apocalypse Now! is a generative artwork created by over 200 National Citizen Service (NCS) participants in workshops at Kent University. The piece was created over 4 weeks of workshops run by Genetic Moo.
The 20m multiple projection piece will be screening at Woolworths on Margate High Street between 10-6pm on the weekend 22nd & 23rd September as part of Margate Festival 2018. It will also be shown on Friday 28th and Sunday the 30th. And there will be a late night showing on Thursday 27th 6-9pm. Woolworths has been empty for years – it’s great to see the building coming to life again. The theme of the festival this year is NOW.
The workshop programme was organised by Victoria Barrow-Williams, Education and Community Engagement Manager at Dreamland, its aim to introduce a range of new skills. We taught the 15-17 year olds how to program their own geometric animations in the Processing language. They also designed their own responsive digital creatures. All the contributions will be brought together into a huge multi-projector artwork inspired by the four elements: earth, water, air & fire and the apocalyptical paintings of the Victorian painter John Martin.
The NCS teenagers really got to grips with learning a new programming language. Despite Computing being on the national curriculum it appears many schools haven’t worked out how to deliver it yet and only about 20% of our participants had done coding before which is shocking to us. We see programming as a vital skill for all people to learn NOW and a brilliant tool for creativity.