Cycle 13 Alt-w Exhibition Award - On Growth And Form
Daniel Brown

1st Sept to 31st October 2021, daily. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

Daniel Brown is a creative technologist working in the fields of generative and interactive art and design. His pioneering 'On Growth and Form' series takes its name from a 1917 book by Scottish biologist Sir D'arcy Thompson, who used mathematics to investigate the shape of plants and animals and the relationships between different species.

At the Music Hall, a custom 'Victoria' iteration of the series also draws upon the 19th century tradition of cultivating and collecting personal and unique species of flowering plants, but with a 21st century nod to the futuristic notion of genetic engineering and artificial life. This unique animation for Aberdeen is generated in real time, and never repeats.

Cycle 13 Alt-w Production Award - Silent Chaos
Marta NoOne & Ugo Vantini

1st Nov to 6th Dec 2021, daily. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

Every human being has become a living set of data and a potential content creator. The Music Hall is now a bespoke information collector, gathering data from the people and the activities occurring there, via a bespoke network of different sensors, which will be visualised live on the screen.

Silent Chaos analyze and decode the world through the use of new technologies. By creating unusual instruments, which can include live plants, to play in their performances, they research and experiment with new media, live video manipulation, sound-driven video and creative coding.

Production Awards

• Bright Side Studios
  Invisible Landscapes of Music
• Charles Young
  Assembly
• Cliona Harmey
  Abderdeen Ships
• Ray Interactive
  You Are Here
• Silent Chaos
  Human AutomatArt

Cycle 13 Alt-w Production Award - Charles Young
www.paperholm.com

October 2019 to March 2020. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

Charles Young is best known for his Alt-w supported project Paperholm, where he designed, made, photographed and animated a tiny model building daily out of paper for one thousand days. His looping moving images explore ideas around the perception of space, imagination and memory.

In this new series of HD animations, a paper model of the neighbourhood that surrounds the Music Hall is shown from varying angles and different heights. This base of the existing city has been added to with a layer of invented structures and occupation that are bound to delight.

Cycle 13 Alt-w Production Award - Bright Side Studios
Susanna Murphy & Cristina Spiteri

October 2019 to March 2020. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

Revealing the dramatic beauty of hidden ecosystems and microscopic landscapes that lie beneath the surface of the musical world. Through film and augmented reality an exploration of scores, instruments and physical media uncovers a mysterious, rarely seen world, now writ large.

Download the Zappar app here.

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

October 2019 to March 2020. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

In this map of the stars directly above the Music Hall, updated live as time passes, the fleeting presence of visitors 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.

Cycle 13 Alt-w Production Award - Cliona Harmey
www.clionaharmey.info

April to June 2019, daily. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

Explore the romance and reality of the sea courtesy of Aberdeen Harbour and the MarineTraffic API. By tracking the location of ships, the constantly updated names of the most recently arrived and most recently departed vessels are juxtaposed on the Music Hall's Stepping In Space screen, creating a form of poetic writing.

Irish artist Cliona Harmey's work attempts to interrupt the speed of this instantaneous data stream and return it to the speed of movement of real entities in space. The names include references to Scots and Nordic culture conjuring up historical figures and distant places in this localised iteration of her previous work Dublin Ships (2015).

Cycle 07 Alt-w Production Award -
Andy Law & Mil Stricevic
www.milish.studio

19th August to 30th September 2019. FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS

Focusing on the archiving of 'rude' data, each frame in this series of animations is generated by taking a single strip of pixels from an image in the cache of a computer's web browser, and rotating it about a fixed axis.

The process is repeated on each subsequent strip to produce an animation that substitutes an explicit image for something seemingly innocent. The computer oblivious to the perceived corrupting influence of what it's processing.

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.

Cycle 14 of the fund will commission and curate work for presentation on the 4.5m high LED screen that welcomes every visitor to the refurbished Music Hall in Aberdeen. The deadline for applications is the 28th February 2022 at 6pm.

Our curatorial focus is two-fold, long-form generative work that's infinite and algorithmic in nature, or short-form looping animation. Both should be silent and have immediacy for presentation in a transient space with a limited dwell time.

This opportunity is for both new or existing work. Lead applicants for a new commission should be based in Scotland but can collaborate with anyone from anywhere. Applications for existing work can be from anywhere.

Book an application surgery here.