One of our talented Linen Lab artists, Robert Peters, was a recent recipient of AmmA’s Digital Art Mentorship Award. This award offered 3 creatives in the borough an opportunity to undertake one to one mentoring with a Digital Arts Specialist across all mediums including Photography, Film Making, Print Making, Textiles, Sculpture, Poetry, Textile Design & Fashion, Ceramics.
The aim of the award was to enable artists to transform how their creative work is viewed, altered or enhanced using digital technology. Each artist received 16 hours of one on one mentoring with their digital arts specialist to empower selected participants with new skills, knowledge and confidence alongside showcasing and celebrating their work during exhibition.
Robert Peters was accepted on this innovative programme and teamed with artist Cahal McDonnell to learn how augmented reality could be incorporated into static artworks. The developed work created as part of the mentorship was exhibited in a Pop-Up Exhibition called ‘Merge’ at the Market Place Theatre and Arts Centre from March 12th-15th 2019.
Robert says of this mentor: “Cahal was an excellent mentor who paced the learning to perfection. I incorporated what I learnt about an app called Artivive into several artworks which also encompassed collaborative prints on linen by students from the SRC Lurgan Campus.”
“I created short films from footage of young people working in linen mills and layered these with text about working conditions in the mills and what ages children could start working. I also created a film/text piece on working conditions in iPhone factories in which people spend long hours creating the technology Augmented Reality relies on. What I really liked about the app was that it looped the footage so that the repeated actions of the children played over and over again, suggesting how boring this work must have been.”
In conjunction with this Digital Art Mentorship Award, Robert combined his workshops for the Linen Lab Connected Project to his work on the augmented reality app. Robert explored the working conditions of mill workers in the late 1800’s when linen was a major industry in Ulster and worked with students at Southern Regional College, looking at employment issues within the creative industries.
This project introduced Robert to the app Artivive which provides artists with a platform for their artwork and audiences an app through which to engage with art in a dynamic manner. Here is one piece which incorporates an image made by a student from SRC over which Robert has laid some footage and text. Download the Artivive App to your tablet or phone to see what happens!
Robert added: “ I really appreciate the assistance of the SRC students”.