Lovebytes is a digital arts organisation based in

Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...

, UK, established in 1994 and best known for the Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art. Founded by Jon Harrison and Janet Jennings who are the directors of the organisation. Lovebytes explores the cultural and creative potential of digital technology. The festival is a platform for innovative and experimental new work in the fields of

digital art Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various name ...

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

, film,

interactive media Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various f ...

and creative software. The programme includes specially commissioned

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

performances and interactive installations in public spaces supported by film screenings, talks, workshops and educational projects. Lovebytes is a not-for-profit limited company supported by the Arts Council England.

History

Lovebytes was founded by Jon Harrison and Janet Jennings who are the directors of the organisation. Lovebytes has held many festivals between the years 1994 and 2012. Works from this festival has been placed in different locations across Sheffield attracting a lot of media attention. In the late 1990s Lovebytes also did some collaborative festivals/ events, e.g. Lovebytes / Senti-ents at The Unit.1999. In May 2000 Lovebytes released its first publication DSP 1 Audio CD and CD ROM and after that went on to release two more, DSP 2 Volatile Media DVD publication and exhibition released March 2002. Including work by People Like, Alex Peverett, Butler Brothers, Steve Hawley. DSP 3 CD ROM publication and exhibition released in March 2003. Featuring. Nullpointer, Lia.mc, Kurt Ralske, Dextro. Lovebytes had over 75,000 visitors in 2010 and runs various educational projects introducing young people to creative technology and computer programming through a range of playful and imaginative arts activities throughout the world. They also work with schools, colleges, universities, clubs, art galleries, libraries, community centers and interact with interested people in public spaces.

Festivals and events

Multimedia Revue. (1994), a Lovebytes event featuring (Burn:Cycle / Virtual Nightclub). Venues: Showroom Workstation,

Lovebytes.(1995) Featuring James Wallbank Venues: Workstation (Sheffield) & United Gallery, Sheffield. Lovebytes Digital Art and Multimedia Festival. (1996) Featuring Sera Furneaux, Venues:

Showroom Cinema The Showroom Cinema is an independent cinema, café bar and creative workspace contributing to the culture in Sheffield, England. In 2002, the cinema was voted the favourite independent cinema of '' Guardian'' readers. In November 2007, Showro ...

, Workstation and

Site Gallery Site Gallery is an art gallery in Sheffield, England. It specialises in moving image, new media and performance based art. Site Gallery is based at Brown Street in Sheffield's Cultural Industries Quarter. It is an international centre for con ...

. Lovebytes Festival. (1998) Featuring

Farmers Manual Farmers Manual is an electronic music and visual art group, founded in Vienna in the beginning of the 1990s. The core members of the collective are Mathias Gmachl, Stefan Possert, Oswald Berthold, Gert Brantner, and Nik Gaffney. Part of the very ...

, Pita (

Peter Rehberg Peter Rehberg (29 June 1968 – 22 July 2021), also known as Pita, was a British-Austrian composer of electronic audio works. He was the head of Editions Mego, which he founded in 2006 as a successor to Mego. Early life Rehberg was born in To ...

). Venues: Showroom Cinema, Workstation and various around Sheffield City Centre. Digital Originals (2000) Lovebytes festival Showroom Cinema, Sheffield (6–8 April). Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art. (2001) Featuring Florian Hecker

Richard Chartier Richard Chartier (born March 29, 1971) is a sound/installation artist and graphic designer from the United States. He works in reductionist microsound electronic music, a form of extreme minimalism characterised by quiet and sparse sound. Early ...

. Venues: Showroom Cinema &

National Centre for Popular Music The National Centre for Popular Music was a museum in Sheffield, England, for pop and rock music and contemporary culture generally, a £15 million project largely funded with contributions from the National Lottery, which opened on 1 Mar ...

, Sheffield. Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art. (2002) Featuring: Scanner (Robin Rimbaud),

Yasunao Tone (b. 1935) is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the sixties, he was acti ...

. Venues: Showroom Cinema,

Millennium Galleries The Millennium Gallery is an art gallery and museum in the centre of Sheffield, England. Opened in April 2001 as part of Sheffield's Heart of the City project, it is located in the city centre close to the mainline station, the Central Library ...

, Persistence Works, Sheffield Independent Film. Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art. (2003) Featuring: Carsten Nicolai (

Alva Noto Carsten Nicolai (18 September 1965), also known as Alva Noto, is a German musician and visual artist. He is a member of the music groups Diamond Version with Olaf Bender (Byetone), Signal with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender, Cyclo with Ryoj ...

), Chris Watson,

Nobukazu Takemura Nobukazu Takemura (竹村延和 ''Takemura Nobukazu'') is a Japanese musician and artist. Born in Hirakata, Osaka in August 1968, he became interested in music at a young age by listening to the radio, and began to make music at home with a ta ...

, General Magic. Venues: Showroom Cinema, Exhibitions at Site Gallery 15 February – 22 March. Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art. (2005) Featuring:

Peter Greenaway Peter Greenaway, (born 5 April 1942) is a Welsh film director, screenwriter and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. Common traits in his films are th ...

Francisco López (musician) Francisco López is an avant-garde experimental musician and sound artist. He has released a large amount of sound pieces with record labels from more than fifty countries and realized hundreds of concerts and sound installations worldwide; incl ...

Venues: Showroom Cinema, Workstation Studio, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield Independent Film & Site Gallery (14 April – 18 June). Environments International Festival of Digital Art and Media, Lovebytes. (2006) Featuring

Francis Dhomont Francis Dhomont (born 2 November 1926) is a French composer of electroacoustic / acousmatic music. Biography Born in Paris, Dhomont studied composition under Ginette Waldmeier, Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger. In 1963 he decided to dedic ...

(2006),

Carl Michael von Hausswolff Carl Michael von Hausswolff (born 1956) is a composer, visual artist, and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. His main tools are recording devices (camera, tape deck, radar, sonar) used in an ongoing investigation of electricity, frequency, ar ...

. Venues: Showroom Cinema, Millennium Galleries, Workstation, Site Gallery,

University of Sheffield Union of Students Sheffield Students' Union, officially known as the University of Sheffield Students' Union, is the representative body of students at the University of Sheffield. It is run by a team of thirteen elected officers (7 full-time officers and 6 par ...

. Lovebytes. Process (2007) Featuring

Biosphere (musician) Geir Jenssen (born 30 May 1962)Thompson, Dave (2000) ''Alternative Rock'', Miller Freeman, , p.197-198 is a Norwegian electronic musician and composer who records as Biosphere. A resident of Tromsø within the Arctic Circle, Jenssen is well know ...

aka (Geir Jenssen)

, Owl Project Venues: Sheffield Winter Gardens,

Sheffield Central Library Sheffield Central Library is a public library in Sheffield, England. It houses the city library service's single largest general lending and reference collection, as well as Graves Art Gallery, on the third floor, and a theatre in the basemen ...

, Showroom Cinema, Site Gallery, University of Sheffield Union of Students, Millennium Galleries, The Moorlands Centre (

Edale Edale is a village and civil parish in the Peak District, Derbyshire, England, whose population was 353 at the 2011 Census. Edale, with an area of , is in the Borough of High Peak. Edale is best known to walkers as the start, or southern end, ...

). Lovebytes. Digital Art in Sheffield. (2008) Featuring and, Stephen Mathieu, Advanced Beauty, Universal Everything. Venues: Showroom Cinema, Millennium Galleries, Sylvester Space, Access Space Sheffield. A Festival of Digital Creativity and Culture. January–June. (2010) Featuring: C.E.B. Reas, Golan Levin, Mehmet Akten, Francisco Lopez, Mark Fell Venues: Millennium Galleries, Winter Garden, Electric Works, Persistence Works. Lovebytes- Digital Spring. (2012) Featuring: Alan Turing Centenary Exhibition, MegaDork, Onedotzero, Daniel Brown Jana Winderen, Venues: Showroom Cinema, Sheffield Central Library, Meadowhall Shopping Centre, Upper Chapel, Winter Garden.

Other projects

Paradise Website Commission (1997) Paradise. is a web project initiated by the innovative UK arts ensemble Forced Entertainment. Commissioned by Lovebytes as part of the Channel Metropolis series, funded by the Arts Council England Hypertribes (1998) Citywide new media public art installations. Showroom Cinema, Sheffield (16 March – 25 April) :*Event Details: :*Vanishing points of view by Mike Lawson Smith at Furnival Gate :*Stone Troupers by Steve Hawley & Jonathan Allen at Division Street :*Hyperphilately by Simon Poulter at Sheffield Post Office, Fitzalan Square :*Provincially/Provisionally by Andrew Stones at Sheffield's New Town Hall :*Flocked by Lulu Quinn at the House of Fraser in Sheffield High Street :*Remote Systems Premium Leisure at Ponds Forge Sports Centre in Commercial Street Lovebytes Lite (2003) Live performances by Mark Fell and Jez Potter (SND, Shirt Trax). at Sheffield Millennium Galleries. Lovebytes (2005–2009) A plasma screen installation at Sheffield Millennium Galleries, in collaboration with

Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, known as Museums Sheffield is a charity created in 1998 to run Sheffield City Council’s non-industrial museums and galleries. Museums Sheffield currently manages three sites in the city: Graves Art Gall ...

. Digital Space (2006–2008) Showroom Cinema. A programme of events and exhibitions in collaboration with Showroom Workstation. Including work by: Vicki Bennett ( People Like Us), Blast Theory, Steve Hawley, Derek Lodge, Terry Smith, Single Shot, Simon Warner, Caroline Locke, Andrew Kotting, Janek Schaefer, Nullpointer. The Big Byte (2009) The Big Byte was a year-long programme of events supported by Arts Council England and Screen Yorkshire and delivered in partnership by various community organisations in Sheffield including: Sheffield Children's Festival, Sheffield Young Singers and Showcomotion Film Festival. Designosaurs! (2011) A

project combining

craft A craft or trade is a pastime or an occupation that requires particular skills and knowledge of skilled work. In a historical sense, particularly the Middle Ages and earlier, the term is usually applied to people occupied in small scale pro ...

, computers and the creative imaginations of over 1,500 Sheffield school children, culminating in an interactive exhibition at the Sheffield Children's Festival.

Publications

DSP 1 Audio CD and CD ROM released in May 2000. Part of the Digital Space Programme, a commissioning scheme for exhibition digital publications. DSP 2 Volatile Media DVD publication and exhibition released March 2002. Including work by People Like us, Alex Peverett, Steve Hawley. DSP 3 CD ROM publication and exhibition released in March 2003. Featuring. Nullpointer.

References

External links

* * *
Lovebytes Official WebsiteLovebytes Festival of Digital Art & Media, BBC, 2006
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lovebytes Sheffield

Annual events in the United Kingdom Annual may refer to: * Annual publication, periodical publications appearing regularly once per year **Yearbook ** Literary annual * Annual plant * Annual report * Annual giving * Annual, Morocco, a settlement in northeastern Morocco * Annuals (b ...

Film festivals in England Culture in Sheffield Digital media organizations Documentary film festivals in the United Kingdom Documentary film organizations Events in Sheffield Festivals in South Yorkshire Film organisations in the United Kingdom