From Home is a project to capture the experience of home as it is lived and articulated by a broad range of individuals, presenting those experiences with digital technologies that are both reflective and illuminating.

Wherever it is shown, From Home invites and encourages those members of the public who experience the piece to contribute their own thoughts on home, so that the artwork becomes ever more layered, reflecting the rich complexity embedded in that single word home.

At an event for Brighton Digital Festival I presented with Marc Green, co-producer of Time and Tide, we met Tom Ottway from Language Umbrella media. Tom had researched ‘home’ and stories of home at the University of Sussex for many years, and we all felt that the subject was ideal for a piece of immersive theatre or interactive media.

Supported by the team at FuseBox innovation lab in Brighton, we later held our first event for Brighton Digital Festival, with Chris Chowen and Chandler Dagg creating the VR experience that hosts our content.

The story so far

The project began before lockdown, with a wealth of pre-pandemic material already gathered. From March 2020, we documented the various stages of lockdown at home as a piece of living archive, or social history in action. We asked the public to send in short videos of their experiences of home at this time, with great and varied responses coming in from all around the world.

Contributions ranged from people talking of self-isolating in a garden shed, to writing messages in pebbles on a beach and singing songs of hope in Montreal, Canada; of domestic violence in lockdown from India, to giving birth in lockdown in Margate; from a displaced Romanian performance poet’s expression of her body as home, to a man’s moving story of mourning his father.

I also wrote and co-produced a short film, Homecoming, completed during lockdown with the actor Samuel West. Read more about Homecoming here.

Our first event at the 2021 Brighton Digital Festival, supported by Wired Sussex’s innovation lab FuseBox, placed our extensive audio and visual content at the heart of an immersive VR experience. The event was programmed by Lighthouse, and supported through Digital Democracies, a programme led by Threshold Studios.
In the virtual environment, viewable with a 360 headset, visitors made their own way through a series of rooms – scanned from real-life locations, including participant’s homes, together with performance spaces such as the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts – and interacted at their own pace to experience the embedded sound art and videos.

After the experience, they were invited to be interviewed about their personal ideas of home while filmed in front of a green screen, creating content that will itself be used in the virtual world, as the project develops.

A launch party saw the live element of From Home brought to the fore, with some of the performers who had submitted material to the project entertaining the audience.