Christmas 2024 closing dates
(image created using ChatGPT)
Digital Arts Studios will be closed from Monday 22nd December 2025, reopening on Tuesday 6th January 2026.
🎄 Have a lovely festive holiday and see you in the new year! 🎄
We have had a very busy year and welcomed many, many new faces to the studios through our extensive programme of residencies, workshops, exhibitions, talks, and even a comedy show.
Following the success of the DAS XR Lab, launched in April ‘24, we started 2025 with Lab Work, an exhibition highlighting the various events and successes of the XR Lab, alongside the extraordinary work from nine of its participants.
Our eclectic and energetic swansong in-house Home Residents’ exhibition Spread Against the Sky took place in May. In a conceptual shift, the first floor was then repurposed into the Production Lab, a bespoke and highly versatile space for creatives to experiment, test and showcase, which was launched officially in July.
Since then, we have showcased work from four ACNI Digital Evolutions awardees: Graham Robinson, Helena Hamilton, Paul Moore and Rodrigo Romero-Flores and Immersive Arts awardee Aiden Brady. The space has been also used by artists to test build interactive installations, and showcase video and audio artworks.
We were delighted to have Allison Maria Rodriguez return from Boston in August to give a talk about A Human Glimpse of Cosmic Time, a project that incorporates footage of Northern Irish neolithic sacred sites, began during her residency at Digital Arts Studios back in 2023.
Following an open call in April, Dublin artist Aoife Dunne was selected as our first Immersive Art Resident. The residency, which ran in partnership with Beta Festival, Ireland, culminated in the superlative immersive exhibition OBSIDIAN at Riddel’s Warehouse, Belfast in November. Aoife’s stunning audio-visual work and meticulous installation was arguably a genuine first for the city, with the past and future in glorious contrasting harmony.
And as if this wasn’t enough, Australian artist Lauren Moffat joined us as part of her S+T+ARTS4Water II Challenge and STARTS Residency, in association with Beta Festival and the ADAPT Research Centre, Dublin, and the Port of Belfast. Lauren developed her project Chorcorallium which was presented during BETA Festival in November.
We have had the pleasure of hosting ten Home Residents during 2025, and have run ten workshops for our residents and members, ranging from painting in VR with Jacqueline Toal, constructing an artist manifesto through a cyber-feminist lens with Fiona Gordon and Roibí O’Rua, and an investigative field trip to Lough Neagh with Ami Clarke.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our supporters, whether a casual visitor, artist-in-residence, DAS member, partner organisation, or even that lone comedian. Your support is vital and very much appreciated!
Have a wonderful holiday and we look forward to 2026!
From Angela, Richard and Catherine.