The Cultural Exchanges festival is an annual cultural festival held at De Montfort University, Leicester, England. The festival started in the year 2000 and is usually held over 5 days attracting up to 4,000 people each year.
Cultural eXchanges Festival 2021 is looking for a piece of art to be the image of the online festival next year! All art forms are welcome, no rules or briefs, but we would love to see your work that resembles our statement this year:
INNOVATION EXPRESSION TRANSFORMATION
The winner shall receive a £50 cash prize and their design on our online brochure & website. Alongside this, finalists work shall be part of an online exhibition
Submit your work & any questions over to mculturalexchanges@dmu.ac.uk
DEADLINE 29-11-20
REQUIREMENTS: Please can all submissions to be 300 DPI & PNGWe cant wait to see your masterpiece!”
Having found out about the opportunity over email, I submitted an art piece to have the chance of featuring in the Cultural eXchanges Festival 2021 Online Exhibition and flyer design. Although the work didn’t get accepted as the flyer design, it still featured in a successful online exhibition as a finalist runner up.
The virtual exhibition was created using Artsteps and featured interactive information panels, the ability to add comments and vote for the Audience Choice Award winner.
USEFUL LINKS:
Audience Choice Award Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSex6Zrzz7D9ee0p5N6nrwr_xkDDWA8J3dtYUP0rlBBIOnDESQ/viewform?usp=sf_link
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/cultural_eXchanges21
Online Gallery: https://www.artsteps.com/view/5fea4927bcacd70167cc7a06
The event gave me experience and knowledge in virtual exhibitions, and inspired me to create my own virtual exhibition using Art Steps.
Artsteps is a browser-based platform that uses Unity tools to allow users to build and share their own virtual environments. Features include: The Ability to Design 3D Environments. Integrate Digital Content, including images, audio, video, and 3D objects.
Artsteps is a free virtual exhibition creation application. It can be used to design art exhibits or hold historical exhibitions or other presentations.
Using the application, I created a virtual exhibition to display my artwork, and it can be viewed using the following link:
https://www.artsteps.com/view/5fb6d617a368c430a6eefe06?currentUser
There are various advantages of an online exhibition, for example they are cheaper, and can give you more exposure. There are also disadvantages, for example they are not as personal or in many cases official or give an proper sense of authenticity for the artist(s). Overall I found the experience to be useful, and feel that using the internet to exhibit artwork goes hand in hand as an artist already dealing with post-internet art in their practice.
