From Home launches at Brighton Digital Festival

The first event for the From Home project was held at the Brighton Digital Festival (BDF) on the 4th & 5th November 2021 at Fusebox, Wired Sussex’s innovation hub. This event – a prototype of larger future exhibitions of the project – marked the first time participants and organisers were able to meet in person, as so much of the planning and creation had taken place during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. 

On entering Fusebox, members of the public tried out the immersive experience, which contained content submitted by people from all over the world on the subject of home. In this virtual environment, viewable with a 360 helmet, visitors made their own way through a series of rooms – scanned from real-life locations, including people’s homes and other spaces such as the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts – and interacted at their own pace to experience the embedded audio pieces and videos.

After the experience, they were invited to an interview about their experiences of home while filmed in front of a green screen. The interviewees responded with insightful and moving personal stories of home, creating content that will itself be used in the virtual world, as the project develops further. 

A launch party on the evening of the 4th saw the live element of From Home brought to the fore, with some of the performers who had submitted material to the project presenting their work on stage. There was also a screening of the short film starring Samuel West that we produced during lockdown, called Homecoming.

A lively discussion followed about the future of From Home, from photo-style booths that could show the virtual experience and collect people’s responses to the idea of home, through touring tents that could appear at Festivals, to a combination of digital and live presentations called ‘Performing Home’.

You can read more about the project and keep up to date with the latest developments here