DREAM MACHINE

This project was created by the BANG network, commissioned for Brighton’s White Night Festival 2010 and directed by Sarah Bird, Kate Genevieve and Abbie Stanton. The project culminated in an animation projection event that lit up the Georgian mansion, Marlborough House, in Central Brighton. So much of what we learnt working on this ambitious multi-platform narrative experiment was essential to our early days so we wanted to share it.

Dream Machine is an experiment in group storytelling and featured the work of over 50 artists and animators: a story of sleep experimentation and imagination told through comics, live performance, radio broadcast and twitter. The Dream Machine story was introduced through the month of October in two comics newspapers (printed by Newspaper Club) that told an alternative history of Marlborough House. Animation projections provided the culmination of this story on the 30th October. An open call was made through the BANG network for animators and filmmakers to vision the dreams of the sleepers inside the building breaking out onto Brighton's streets. The projection performance saw octopus tentacles smashing through windows and intricate generative visions.

Witnessed by a couple of thousand people, the animation played on a rolling programme from 7pm to 3am and each showing finished with a live performance from Brighton University dance students coming out of the building. Inbetween performance times an interactive projection created by Seb Lee Delisle displayed the dreams of festival goers - texted and tweeted to us on the night – on the mansion's facade. Seb has blogged about these interactive projections.

Here's a 3 minute on the project given at FOTB by KG:

The Dream Machine website has more information, full credits and a link to the comic newspapers online.