Output details

Picnic on the screen

‘Picnic on the Screen’ was commissioned through the Arts Council England Cultural Olympiad programme, with the imperative intent to establish creative and sustainable use of urban video screens as a legacy of its investment and infrastructure beyond 2012. By reflecting on the playful public intervention of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s ‘Hole-in-Space’, ‘Picnic on the Screen’ directly responds to the particular public encounter at festival events. This unique project combined Sermon’s established telematic arts practice and concept of telepresence with an interactive augmented-reality interface developed specifically for the installation, providing the telepresent participants with the ability to discover and control animation sequences developed by Charlotte Gould on screen in front of them.

This collaborative partnership resulted in an interactive ludic interface that was first developed for the BBC ‘Village Screen’ (public urban video screen) at Glastonbury Festival in 2009. This work explored the creative potential of the Glastonbury audience as performers who have the capacity to create improvised narrative sequences through urban screens as a communications portal. Through the augmentation of the virtual and the real, users can explore alternative telepresent spaces and develop unique playful narrative events. ‘Picnic on the Screen’ explored social play and the way fun and enjoyment interact with and enhance new media content and technologies, as a means of reclaiming the urban landscape through public screens.

Following its success at the Glastonbury Festival 2009, ‘Picnic on the Screen’ was invited to link public audiences between the Bluecoat Gallery Liverpool and the University of Shanghai, for the first time via a telematic videoconference connection, as part of Liverpool Biennial 2010; between the Lowry, Salford, and the University of Nottingham Ningbo China for the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts Conference in September 2011; and for the official opening of MediaCityUK, Salford in November 2011.

SEE DIGITAL OUTPUT.