Cultural Olympiad 2012
The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad puts culture at the heart of the Olympic Games, encouraging participation and celebrating the diverse cultures that make up the UK. Some of the projects that have already taken place or will be happening in the region:
Current Projects
Abandon Normal Devices - a festival of new cinema and digital culture delivering an annual programme across the region in lead up to games. The programme involves commissioning of a wide range of work from shorts to features and online projects; it also involves professional development and work with the BBC Big Screens.
AND is a partnership between FACT, Cornerhouse and Folly. AND is delivering a spring (March/April) programme and the second festival will take place in Manchester in October 2010. AND has the Inspire mark.
Past Projects
A series of film related works were commissioned for the BBC Live Sites in Liverpool and Manchester and awarded the Inspire mark: these projects ranged from live cinema, to interactive work and art/new media shorts around the theme of disability. The Vision+Media supported projects included: Dadavisions - a curated series of four new film works for 2012 around body and disability, featuring works by Alison Jones, Caroline Parker, So Many Excuses and Gina Czarnecki.
These film works will be showcased for 1000 days to the Paralympic celebrations and are touring to Vancouver for presentations as part of the Vancouver 2010 cultural programme linked to AND. Places of Public Resort - Big Screen Liverpool in association with ICDC (International Centre for Digital Content), Northwest Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University, Liverpool City Council and the BBC with Vision+Media joined forces to support the development of an interactive heritage project for the BBC Live Site in Liverpool for launch at the London 2012 Open Weekend 2009 in the North West.
Places of Public Resort enabled the public to experience the places of public resort of our past through creating a giant video carousel that observers could scroll through using hand movements when stood in Clayton Square, picked up by camera feed and interpreted via responsive software. The carousel contained up to a dozen short news reports dating between 1966 - 1986, chosen from the BBC North West Regional News and Documentary Archive and donated to the NWFA when the BBC moved to videotape formats.
Unsilent Night - a screening of classic British shorts from the silent era, celebrating early primitive film and pioneers in collaboration with contemporary musicians from across the North West. Fonik (Warrington), a.P.a.T.t. (Liverpool) and Frakture (Manchester) performed newly commissioned soundtracks to each at the BBC Big Screen Liverpool in Clayton Square.
Village Screens - Vision+Media contributed to Village Screens, a five day programme of UK film at Glastonbury showcasing a mix of Vision+Media's Virgin and Digital Shorts, as well as other regional short films:
Other Cultural Olympiad Projects
Chester Performs - creates a short film 'narrative' on the topic of equality and diversity for Woven Cultures - a GONW programme for the Cultural Olympiad. Work comes from a range of organisations including Queer Up North, Brouhaha, Action Factory, Barracudas and Community Arts Northwest. Narrative - the short film commissioned for the Woven Cultures programme will be showcased in October 2010 along side a debate and will be co presented as part of AND festival.