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Interact @ LCB20
LCB20 celebrates 20 years of Leicester's creative business centre.
The LCB Depot is the leading creative business centre in Leicester. It is located in the city's Cultural Quarter on Rutland Street and is home to many exciting businesses and organizations. In addition to offices, it features a café, an art gallery, and serves as a general arts venue.
The building was once the bus depot for Leicester City Transport. When the Leicester Cultural Quarter project was announced it was extensively refurbished and reopened in 2004 as The LCB (Leicester Creative Business) Depot. I was lucky enough to be there for the opening night and have been associated with the building ever since. I was working with Bathysphere at the time (who were a founding tenant), and over the years, have rented offices as part of Cuttlefish Multimedia Ltd, Interact Digital Art Ltd and the Computer Arts Archive CIC. I now have space there as [art of the New Media Art Club CIC and will soon be part of the new R10.EMS Heritage Multimedia Studio.
For LCB's 20th anniversary, I wanted to compile all the documentation of the exhibitions and events I've organised at the space onto a single web page. It turns out there's a lot to go through! You'll see that it started in 2014 when the LCB Lightbox Gallery was expanded and I was asked to curate a digital art exhibition celebrating 10 years of the LCB Depot being open. Before that, I ran most of my events in Leicester at the Interact Gallery and Phoenix. I hope you find what you see interesting and it brings back some good memories. A number of the exhibition posters have been installed at the LCB Depot as part of the venue-wide celebration.
Sean Clark
October 2024
seanc@interactdigitalarts.uk
Photo Galleries
The Exhibitions and Events pages below contain many hundreds of photographs of things I have done at LCB Depot over the yearts. These are mostly in Flickr and Google Photos galleries. Here is a selection of just 30 to give you a flavour of my activities at the LCB Depot. The begin in 2014. when I started to do exhibitions at the LCB Lightbox.
Exhibitions & Events
The first Interact Digital Arts exhibition to be held at the LCB Lightbox Gallery was to help celebrate 10 years since the opening of The Depot. It featured work by local and international artists.
DP Henry was a pioneering computer drawing artist. I brought together a collection of his work plus artwork by others involved in computer drawing and drawing machines.
This was a show I had wanted to do for a while. I featured original artwork by members of the band Crass. It took on a life of its own, with former members of the band getting involved and a number of live events.
This was my first solo show at LCB Lightbox Gallery and was an important outcome of my PhD research. It featured multiple computer artworks that were able to communicate with each other via the gallery WiFi..
1990s cyberculture is my long-time interest, and this exhibition brought together images, multimedia and music from the era. It included a live performance from Higher Intelligence Agency.
This was a joint exhibition from Ester Rolinson and myself. It featured joint and individual artworks and came on the back of our winning the Lumen Prize for 3D/Sculture in 2016.
Gallery Without Walls was a distributed art gallery with its hub at the LCB Depot. It was operated in collaboration with Graff.io and went through six exhibition cycles.
This was the first showing of an exhibition of computer artwork put together to celebrate 50 years of the Computer Arts Society. It went on to be shown as part of the Brighton Digital festival.
As a follow-up to the 2014 Interact exhibition, I organised another exhibition in the LCB Lightbox, focussing on local digital artists (with a few international contributions.
The 2018 CAS50 exhibition was very successful and an exhibition of new donated artwork was shown in 2019. The combined exhibition was then shown at the Royal College of Art. the V&A and the BCS in London.
Another great exhibition of artworks featuring local digital artists. This exhibition happened during a very good year for Interact Digital Arts, with a series of other high-profile exhibitions elsewhere.
COVID-19 seriously affected our exhibition plans for 2020. However, with Arts Council support, we ran a series of online exhibitions and events that were 'based' at the LCB Depot.
Computer Arts Archive / Interact Office (2020 - 2023)
Taking on a new office at the LCB Depot in January 2020, was in retrospect, not the best timing! However, it did provide us with a base for our work on Light Up Leicester 2020 and storage for the growing Computer Arts Archive during COVID-19.
Our first post-COVID-19 exhibition was dedicated to original artworks created on the ZX Spectrum micro-computer of the 1980s. It featured artwork and early computer hardware.
LCB asked Interact to become involved in their 2022 Design Season. This involved taking over a vacant shop on Granby Street and running it as an interactive art gallery for two weeks.
The LCB Depot was instrumental in setting up the Beta X space on Church Gate in Leicester. We made use of this as part of our Lighting the Way education project for the Light Up Leicester 2022 festival.
Interact's next involvement in Beta X was a month of digital arts activities- workshops, exhibitions and events - led by the Monobloc Collective. The Monobloc evolved into the New Media Art Club Co-lab at LCB.
We organised a one-off live event featuring Leicester band Billion O'Clock with support artists and live multimedia and visuals in the LCB Lightbox Gallery. It resulted in some great video recordings and photos.
The annual Digital Arts Month in January at LCB Depot is the spiritual successor to the Interact events previously held in the LCB Lightbox. For 2023, Sean Clark contributed artwork and events.
New Generations used artworks held in the Computer Arts Archive to inspire contemporary digital artists. It was supported by an Arts Council grant to the New Media Art Club.
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