DERBY.- QUAD presents new and existing work by Rebecca Allen a world-renowned USA based digital art pioneer. The exhibition, Sync(Emerge(Consciousness)) includes the premiere of a new VR commission for QUAD. The exhibition also features recent VR artworks featuring installations that stimulate the senses including smell, physical interaction, artists film, audio and immersive VR - 'Inside' and 'Tangle of Mind and Matter' as well as a selection of works drawn from her astounding career, including the interactive large screen installation 'Bush Soul (#3)' and the video 'Musique Non Stop' made for electronic music innovators Kraftwerk. Sync(Emerge(Consciousness)) is curated by Helen Starr, The Mechatronic Library and Peter Bonnell, Senior Curator, at QUAD. Rebecca Allen is also QUAD’s International Digital Fellow for 2018-2019.

QUAD has commissioned Latvia based artist Zane Zelmene, to produce an immersive digital installation combining holographic sculptures, spherical screens and immersive VR for her solo exhibition ‘The Specious Present’, featuring new VR works inspired by the natural environment and landscape of Derbyshire, specifically the Peak District, including the prehistoric Stone and Bronze age henge monument Arbor Low stone circle. Zelmene has scanned and filmed in this once-sacred site to create a VR experience of natural and man-made objects.

Leila Johnston, currently QUAD’s Digital Participation Artist in Residence, is exhibiting a body of new work in QUAD’S Extra Gallery Spaces. Touching on themes of transformation, collaboration and hope in the face of uncertainty, her ambient installation comprises of chained LED matrices running film off Raspberry Pi. The LEDs are then diffused through perspex panels to create a dreamlike effect. For the exhibition Leila collaborated with associate dancers, Daniel Longhurst and Megan Smith from Déda, Derby’s centre for dance. The work has also been inspired by a workshop combining dance and new technologies, including Kinect and thermal cameras, co-created with dancer Rosa Cisneros for Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust inpatients. Leila, who is based in Sheffield, specialises in ‘the place where science and technology intersects with culture’. Her previous residencies include working with dancers at Rambert Contemporary Dance Company in London.

Anim18 VR Gallery is a new partnership between QUAD and Anim18, also working with V21 Artspace. The Anim18 exhibition features a selection of works in a VR version of QUAD Gallery, showing VR sculptures and the best of British Animation exploring the themes of ‘Politics and Persuasion’, ‘Young at Heart’, ‘Breaking Boundaries’ and ‘Connections’.

Rebecca Allen, Sync(Emerge(Consciousness)) and Zane Zelmene, The Specious Present exhibitions are on display in QUAD Gallery from 10th November 2018 until 3rd February 2019. QUAD Gallery is open 11:00am to 5:00pm daily, opening at 12 noon on Sundays.

Leila Johnston’s new work and the Anim18 VR Gallery are on display from 10th November 2018 until 3rd February 2019 in QUAD Extra Gallery Spaces and QUAD Resourse Area, open from 10:00am to 10:00pm daily.

The exhibitions are all free to visit.

Rebecca Allen’s is a world leading digital art pioneer her work is celebrated internationally and is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Previous collaborators include artists such as Kraftwerk, Mark Mothersbough (Devo), John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Peter Gabriel, Carter Burwell, Twyla Tharp, Joffrey Ballet, La Fura dels Baus and Nam June Paik.

Zane Zelmene is a new media artist working in the fields of video art, audio-visual performance and land art. Her work covers a range of diverse areas, and examines the intersection between technology and nature, antiquity and modernity, opposites and their coexistence in space. Zelmene graduated from the Visual Communication Department at the Art Academy of Latvia in 2016, going on to complete her MA in new media art at the University of Lisbon, Portugal in 2015.

Leila Johnston is a Sheffield-based artist that has completed residencies in the UK and abroad and has exhibited at The Lowry in Manchester and at a number of festivals. She is also Digital Curator at the Site Gallery, Sheffield.

Anim18 is a UK-wide celebration of British animation, taking place throughout 2018. Led by Film Hub Wales, Chapter (Cardiff), the BFI Film Audience Network and project partners, programmes include screenings and events across the UK.