Brighton Digital Festival: Cutting edge creativity

Brighton Digital Festival promises a packed programme of digital delights this September

Brighton Digital Festival, the city’s largest celebration of digital culture, is back! Celebrating its third birthday, the festival, which runs from Sunday 1 to Monday 30 September, returns with its biggest ever programme and more than 120 events, with something for everyone, from families and art lovers to makers and programming geeks.

Once again, the festival brings together the best creative minds and technologists. This year’s line-up features everything from highbrow conferences, 48-hour hackathons and new cutting edge art installations to comedy nights, live music performances and everything in between. Here’s a sneak peek at some of this year’s highlights.

Comedy & celebs
Brighton Digital Festival will present a specially created Charity Chuckle stand-up comedy night. Award nominee David Trent, TV personality Nathan Penlington, Joseph Morpurgo and Phil Lucas will marry comedy with digital at the Komedia on Tuesday 10 September.

Leading writers, producers and presenters are coming to the city this September, including broadcaster, satirist and journalist Charlie Brooker who will talk at the Duke’s At Komedia following an exclusive Black Mirror screening. Maggie Philbin, presenter of BBC’s Bang Goes The Theory and founder of Teen Tech, plus BBC News Online Technology writer and presenter, Bill Thompson, will both chair debates
at the Mini Maker Faire (Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 September).

Adam Buxton is also appearing (one half of Adam and Joe, regular face on TV and host of BUG at the BFI Southbank), talking at dConstruct on Friday 6 September.

Leading digital conferences
An internationally renowned range of cutting edge conferences are also scheduled this year, including dConstruct, the festival’s most popular conference which explores the biggest issues in digital today. Aimed at web designers and developers, the event brings together some of the world’s leading digital creatives on Friday 6 September at Brighton Dome.

Reasons To Be Creative (formerly known as Flash on the Beach) offers three days of inspiring talks by leading professionals from the creative industries, and takes place from Monday 2 to Wednesday 4 September at The Dome.

Furthermore, the digital culture conference Improving Reality (from Lighthouse) will explore how artists, technologists and writers are disrupting our notion of reality on Thursday 5 September at the Studio Theatre, Brighton Dome .
Joining these popular headline events is the new ConnectedTV Brighton event at Komedia on Wednesday 4 September, delivering a practical guide on making money and reaching new audiences by merging traditional TV formats with other multimedia platforms. There’s also the Let’s Get Real 2013 conference, aimed at helping to improve the digital offering of the cultural sector (Monday 16 September, Dome Studio Theatre).

Art & literary exhibitions
Brighton Digital Festival 2013 also offers an enviable (and mostly free) exhibition programme with pioneering digital artist William Latham and his Mutator 1 + 2 exhibition at Phoenix Brighton from Saturday 7 September. Internationally renowned artist Timo Arnall will reveal the invisible infrastructure making up our technological world from Thursday 5 September at Lighthouse.

Originally commissioned for Kew Gardens as a permanent exhibition, Swimming with Plankton is another visually stunning and highly educational piece (Booth Museum of Natural History, Friday 6 to Wednesday 25 September).

The not to be missed literary event Flash Lit Fiction, also returns for a third year offering a night of digitally-enhanced story-telling and a day of workshops and talks (Latest Musicbar, Thursday 26 September).

Open Studios programme
Brighton and Hove’s business community will once again open its doors to the public within the unique Open Studios week, running from Monday 23 to Friday 27 September. Participating companies include Crunch Accounting, BTV Post and DabApps who will offer free seminars, workshops and tours to provide a rare glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes.

Family friendly fun
In addition to the conferences, exhibitions and talks, Brighton Digital Festival also offers a range of family friendly events, including the hugely popular Mini Maker Faire, which returns on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 September to the Corn Exchange.

Celebrating the Maker movement, this inventive and creative faire asks those attending to embrace the do-it-yourself mindset and challenge themselves to discover new and exciting digital inventions.