Cycle 14 Alt-w Production Award -
Frances Priest with Sam Healy
francespriest.co.uk

7th November 2025 to 11th April 2026.
Blackwell, Bowness-on-Windermere LA23 3JT

Motifs from the realm of neoclassical architecture dance and evolve on screen, tracing a journey from the ancient, analogue and physical, to the modern, digital and abstract. Craft techniques such as tiling, mosaic, marquetry, weave and stitch all originated as mathematical pattern structures and here are brought full circle, ‘re-encoded’ as algorithms.

Cycle 13 Alt-w Production Award - Ray Interactive
Sam Healy & Brendan McCarthy

1st December 2025 to January 30th 2026. FREE
Level 2, EFI, 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9EF

In this map of the stars directly above Edinburgh Futures Institute, updated live as time passes, the incoming light generates unique abstract animations. By taking this stellar data set and a computer algorithm called reaction/diffusion, they literally bring the heavens alive.

Restless, vital patterns emerge looking like cells, fingerprints, fungi, animal markings or brain cross-sections. They remind us that all life originates in the stars. Each iteration hints at the fragile balance between growth and death on which beauty, harmony and meaning depend.

For details of our last Atmosphere click here.

Atmosphere is our most popular research and event programme. First premiered at the 2010 Edinburgh International Film Festival, it re-imagines the concept of Atmospheric movie theaters from the 1920s and 30s.

Each expanded screening uses a team of guest artists and creatives to work with technology old and new, multi-sensory interactives and live elements too. Expect some smoke and mirrors, before the bells and whistles.

Explore the Alt-w Fund archive here.

Initiated in Dundee by Scottish Screen, the Alt-w Fund is for practitioners based in Scotland to make and develop new artworks, devices and creative applications that challenge the notions of what new media creativity can be.

The fund supports artists to explore experimental and interactive practice, make use of technology as both medium and message, and recognise the changing role that digital culture has in our society.