Our Work
Electric Pavilion
Background
Electric Pavilion is a major new arts project supported by the Arts Council and the National Lottery. We're extra proud to be involved with it becasue it focuses on our home town of Bristol.
We collaborated with our friends at Submerge and artist Luke Jerram. Apish Angel and Sickboy threw in some ideas too.
Brief
The aim of the project is to not only showcase the creativity and innovation in Bristol but to capture the imagination and inspire people from all sectors of the local population to produce great new creative work.
Solution
The site takes the form of a 're-imagined' Bristol, with five districts or 'zones' each of which says something important about Bristol life. Through the site and artistic commissions, local artists, technologists and members of the public are invited to submit new artwork, films, digital stories, music, writing and even opinions.
The five zones are interactive landscapes - imaginary collages rendered from hundreds of photographs around the city. Flash technology is pushed to the limit: we wanted to create the impression of travelling through the city and the motion transitions between zones are generated in real-time, modelling real velocity and perspective.
Art direction takes cues from all over Bristol's modern creative heritage with nods to it's vibey music scene, highly influential graffiti artists and world-class broadcast and animation work. The interface artwork is hand-drawn with a deliberately unfinished 'work-in-progress' look to mirror the site's evolving nature. Surprisingly for such a creative-led site it is also highly accessible so visitors with disabilities can easily access the content. Low or no-vision users get specially-commissioned poetic text descriptions of the different areas in the site.
Results
The site has been a huge success with over half a million page impressions. More than 20,000 people visited in the first 12 weeks alone. Electric Pavilion received more than 100 project proposals and in total over 300 works have been commissioned including some to artists and collectives from the most disadvantaged areas of the city.
