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Between 30th April and the 3rd of May London’s exciting Shunt Lounge has hosted a massive exhibition involving Arts Collectives from Brighton, Brussels and London. The event incoporated a feast of fascinating performance including: live music, puppetry, dance and physical theatre, video and sound installations, photography, slam poetry, scientists, robotics and more.

The themes for the show were: metacommunication, real-time improvisation and inter-cultural understanding. The exploration of these themes was facilitated by the Metahub.

The MetaHub is a computerised Audio-Visual pool operated by 12 Vj’s, Dj’s and Hackers through which all audio and visual feeds from the entire exhibition pass; all participant artists may then take any data-stream to use as they please. The Shunt Lounge is an incredible labyrinth of caves and arches underneath London Bridge station which serves as an artistic playground, a concert venue and a gallery.

Influenced by the Interdisciplinary Exhibitions « EMMA » run by Artefakt and Kimera in Brussels between 2003 till 2006, Frédéric Monnoye, a brighton-based belgian digital artist, and Guillaume Serve co-ordinated the project by gathering artists from different cultures and disciplines and asking them to perform together within improvised collaboration.

The Basement and Lighthouse are two artistic venues in Brighton who have been supporting the exhibition by hosting a prelaunch in March 2008 and providing us with equipment.

This was a real success, four days of improvised collaborations gave us wonderfull experiments and performences. The Metahub and its Metahubers did an amazing job by collecting visuals and sounds from everywhere in the venue, processing them then broadcasting the results in 40 differents spaces.

The prelaunch for the event ‘Brussels meets Brighton: the Meta-Hub’ has been held at The Basement on thursday 27th March 2008 at 18pm .

The event was a scaled down version of the London show, demonstrating the main concepts behind the exhibition. This included artists talks, live music, live art, live video mixing and a mini version of the Metahub:

• The music performance took the form of an improvised set, with live musicians playing in the Basement simultaneously with musicians in Brussels, linked via a high-speed internet connection.
• The live-art performance involved audience participation and artists on the street linked with wireless cameras to the mini metahub.
• The mini Metahub involved several operators (VJs, Sound Artists, hackers). They were mixing live all the visual feeds, and projecting on to three screens around the Basement.
• The talks introduced the main concepts and players behind ‘Brussels meets Brighton: the Metahub’
• The Event was broadcasted on Radio Reverb from 9pm on air (97.2FM) and online on www.radioreverb.com.