£90,000 digital arts investment for artists in NI

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has announced National Lottery funding investment of £90,000 to support ten individual artists in the creation of exciting, high-quality arts projects using innovative digital technologies. The ten artists include Vicky McFarland, Robin Price, Jonathan Delaney, Michael Lee, Shiva Badiei, Sinead O’Neill Nicholl, Thomas Patrick, Richard Davis, Katya Solomatina, and Paul McMordie.

The funding is part of the Arts Council’s National Lottery Individual Artists Digital Evolution Awards, a programme funded by The National Lottery and match funded by Future Screens NI, which offered artists across all art forms the opportunity to apply for grants of up to £10,000 each. The awards aim to support those artists who are making digital art for the first time or are working with digital or immersive technology in a novel or innovative way.

Matthew Malcolm, Arts Development Officer, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, commented,

“The Arts Council of Northern Ireland is delighted to support these ten artists, thanks to funding from The National Lottery players and support from Future Screens NI. This investment will support these artists in learning new skills to create art using digital and immersive technologies, and widen and diversify audiences, so that more people from all backgrounds can enjoy arts experiences.  This programme reflects the Arts Council’s commitment to invest in creating a sector that is more supported to develop through experimentation and innovation. The National Lottery Individual Artists Digital Evolution Awards encourages innovative practices that cross artform boundaries and builds digital capabilities within the Northern Ireland arts sector, and we look forward to experiencing these ambitious projects as they develop.”

Professor Paul Moore, Director, Future Screens NI, added,

“The rise in both numbers and quality of applications this year is an indication of the growing maturity of the sector in relation to the use of digital tools and strategies in the full spectrum of art forms. The crossover into other sectors continues and there is a welcome focus on both community impact and access. The geographic spread of the awards is also to be welcomed and it will be exciting to see the output from these projects, some of which will actually be ‘in the wild’. It is gratifying to see the Future Screens NI and Arts Council partnership continuing to mature and evolve through engagement with expert practitioners.”

Each of the awardees will now go on to complete a digital arts project including:

Vicky McFarland

Funding amount offered: £9,507.

Project: Story Dome Christmas Crackers.

Story Dome Christmas Cracker will develop a live performance storytelling experience that is blended with spatial ambisonic sound design and AI generated environments and animations to be projected within a dome format. The Story Dome is a fully immersive live storytelling / VR experience for children under 12, combing traditional live storytelling with digital technology to create unique and innovative story experiences for audiences across NI.

Robin Price

Funding amount offered: £10,000.

Project: Integrating digital practice with audience and performer motion control over sound and light.

Using depth mapping and motion tracking this project will explore real time audience interaction to reach out and push laser displays around an installation space or changing their shape as if they were solids.

Jonathan Delaney

Funding amount offered: £9,600.

Project: Dataverses.

Dataverse translates movement, live data streams, and generative systems into a dynamic multi-plane visual display and multi-speaker audio environment and installation. The work uses motion tracking, LiDAR/depth sensors, piezo inputs, microcontrollers, and generative audio-visual algorithms to build a system where physical human movement interacts with global, local, and algorithmic data in real time. This data flows through both a modular synthesizer ecosystem (sound source) and a real-time creative visual engine, creating a constantly shifting immersive world that responds uniquely to each audience interaction and ever-changing data streams.

Michael Lee

Funding amount offered: £9,375.

Project: Grimalins: The Holo Realm.

Grimalins: The Holo Realm is a small-scope prototype for a location-based digital artwork that turns a real site in Northern Ireland into a surreal “portal” experience. Users first see a photoreal Digital Twin of the location captured using 3D Gaussian Splatting which gradually fades and morphs into an authored and stylised alternative version of the same space—the Grimalin Realm. As the transformation completes, the first creature appears: Doomscroller, a mischievous folklore entity who potters through the realm tending “brain plants”—a playful but unsettling metaphor for algorithmic attention, compulsion loops, and cultural echo chambers.

Shiva Badiei

Funding amount offered: £6562.

Project: Sounding the Farset.

Shiva Badiei is a Persian migrant based on Townsend Street. Sounding the Farset is a new spatial film and immersive soundwalk rooted in the lived environment of Townsend Street, one of Belfast’s most contested and continuously transforming urban corridors. The project uses ambisonic field recording, binaural composition, and digital film techniques to create a sensory portrait of a place defined by peace gates, the Westlink motorway, industrial decline, emerging creative industries, and the hidden river that gave Belfast its name.

Sinead O’Neill Nicholl

Funding amount offered: £10,000.

Project: Critical Domesticities.

Critical Domesticities is a multi-channel sound installation in 489/491 Antrim Road, a four-storey Victorian House in North Belfast, using MAX/MSP to create multiple and varied complex compositions using software plug-ins, timers and other edits that amplify the story of ‘others’ providing an alternative narrative to the history of the building.

Thomas Patrick

Funding amount offered: £7,291.

Project: Ascend Expanded.

Ascend is a Virtual Reality experience that provokes the emotional experience of acceptance and being loved just as we are, right now. This project further develops Ascend through additional narrative development, haptic elements and the exploration of a room sized version with projection that 10 people can experience together.

Richard Davis

Funding amount offered: £7,614.

Project: Research and development of a new interactive sculptural installation for exhibition.

This project will see the development of an interactive sound installation responsive to audience movement and engagement with static 3D printed sculptures which act as an experimental choir. Audience behaviour controls the performance of the sculptures placing them as the composers of the installation.

Ekaterina Solomatina

Funding amount offered: £10,000.

Project: Places in Sync.

Rooted in the artist's own experience of having lived for five years in the Republic of Ireland and five years in the Northern Ireland, Places in Sync is a prototype for a mixed-reality sculpture that links touch, light and places across the island of Ireland; designed to encourage intergenerational dialogue.

The Mixed reality, headset-based installation consists of a low body of sand with an embedded tracking system and a separate glowing object; and movement triggers two 3D Gaussian splat environments of different places. Picking up the rock allows audiences to record a short description of two places they connect in their own experience (one in Northern Ireland, one in the Republic of Ireland). These recordings will be stored and linked to a new virtual object.

Paul McMordie

Funding amount offered: £9,750.

Project: REBIRTH: A Generative Audio-Visual Sanctuary Installation.

REBRITH is a site-specific digital art installation responding to Downpatrick's unique acoustic and cultural landscape through algorithmic dark ambient soundscapes embedded with binaural beats, responsive projected visuals, and contemplative installation design. Field recordings captured from the town—landscapes, streets, atmosphere, ambient sounds—become compositional material through spectral processing, granular synthesis, and time-domain manipulation while Soundscapes evolve continuously using TouchDesigner 3D projection mapping and JavaScript generative algorithms.

The National Lottery Individual Artists Digital Evolution Awards is one of the Arts Council’s core National Lottery programme areas. To date the programme has provided £366,651 funding to artists in the delivery of 40 digital arts projects across the region.

Visit www.artscouncil-ni.org for current funding opportunities.