Freedom Festival to embrace tech for innovative new outdoor performances
‘FREEDOM AT HOME’: Freedom Festival 2020 will include performances from artists including Emma Fee, hosted online. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
By Rick Lyon
Audiences in Hull will be able to experience immersive outdoor performances using the latest digital technologies when Covid-19 restrictions are lifted.
Hull’s annual Freedom Festival will be held online this weekend, in response to the pandemic. Freedom 2020 will feature a programme of events featuring international talent and local acts broadcast digitally and via the BBC.
The Freedom Festival Arts Trust has also announced plans to deliver additional online events throughout the year, via its new app.
Now, it has been revealed Freedom will be further extended to include interactive performances using new technologies in outdoor public spaces as part of the ‘Digital Democracies’ programme.
The two-year project, funded by Arts Council England, is being led by Northampton-based Threshold Studios and will see Freedom team up with Brighton Digital Festival and Lincoln’s Frequency Festival.
Digital Democracies will include workshops to bring together the creative arts and digital sectors to learn more about potential collaborations. It will also identify artists and commission a series of works using new technologies in public spaces that will tour between the three cities.
The first works have already been commissioned, with a view to being able to provide outdoor audiences with an innovative new experience when coronavirus restrictions are lifted.
‘EXCITING’: Mikey Martins, from Freedom Festival Arts Trust
Mikey Martins, artistic director and joint chief executive of Freedom Festival Arts Trust, said Covid-19 has “fast-tracked” collaboration between artistic practices and digital technologies, which now provides an exciting opportunity.
“I see this as being another layer of arts and culture in Hull and how we experience it,” he said.
“There are really creative people in the digital world and we need to work together with them. It’s about creative collaboration and there’s really interesting technology going on with art.
“It’s a really exciting, very near future. It’s starting to happen now and it’s being fast-tracked because of this awful Covid situation.
“You have the development of 5G in the background, which will help realise a lot of this work, and you’ve got artists having to re-think their approach - so it could be a perfect storm.”
One of the weekend’s Freedom Festival performances to be delivered online, A Portrait without Borders, will feature robots in an empty theatre drawing portraits of people who upload selfies.
As part of the Digital Democracies programme, it will be repeated outside next year - Covid-19 restrictions permitting - with the robots drawing portraits of people on the side of a building as they walk by, highlighting a key theme or issue.
Mikey said the opportunities are endless.
“It could be an app-based audio walking tour project along the river, it could be a piece of work where you walk up and touch the railings and they change colour - anything where you interact with digital technologies in a public space in a creative way,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a show.
“A lot of it will be phone-based, a lot will be sensors, a lot will be things you stumble upon and you don’t realise you’ve triggered something, like a sound installation.
“You could be walking through a building and realise that suddenly you are creating the lighting.”
The programme is “in no way intended to replicate Freedom Festival”, insisted Mikey, but instead represents an opportunity to develop art and culture in the city in a new direction.
“There’s a lot of learning going on and it’s also important to think of the people who can’t come to live festivals and performances,” he said. “Some people might have health issues, some might be scared of crowds.
“Freedom Festival is a beast - there’s thousands of people wherever you go. If someone doesn’t like that, they won’t come and we won’t reach them with our work. Now it feels like we can.”
ONLINE FESTIVAL: Mikey Martins, left, with Jim Wardlaw from Sauce, showing the Freedom Festival app. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography
Freedom 2020 will be delivered via an app developed by smart tech company Sauce, which is based at Hull’s Centre for Digital Innovation (C4DI).
Mikey believes collaboration such as this is crucial to being able to deliver artistic and cultural performances, either online or as an interactive live experience.
He said: “This is a positive to have come out of this whole awful situation and, longer term, it will prove to be a benefit for us.
“Lots of festivals and organisations have turned to online ways of working but it isn’t as straightforward as just putting some things online that people can watch. What we want to do is collaborate.
“With Sauce, we’ve collaborated about which are the best platforms for particular performances. A lot of artists are also adapting the way they are working and it boils down to how to communicate with the audience.
“You can’t beat a live audience but that doesn’t mean you can’t put on a performance online that is also quite visceral, exciting or makes you feel included. It just means you have to adapt the way you do that.”
The digital Freedom Festival 2020, dubbed ‘Freedom at Home’, will take place from Friday, September 4 to Sunday, September 6.
The app is available to download from the App Store for iOS and Android users.
For more information about the festival, visit the Freedom Festival website.