Dreamhouses was a project and exhibition with Ship of Fools – an artists’ group I belonged to during the mid 1990s which played an important part in developing my ideas and creative confidence. This show was a digital exploration of some ancient themes and stories with a contemporary interpretation, on the way to becoming a game, which was never quite completed – vast amounts of content developed for it may still lurking in the bottom of our old hard drives!

The work was exhibited at the f-stop media station in Bath in 1998.

I created an installation for the show called Eurydice & Orpheus using printed and projected still images, video, a surveillance camera, a periscope, mirrors and a laser serpent.

Work in the exhibition by the other members of the group – Terryl Bacon, Jon Dovey, Constance Fleuriot and Martin Rieser – can be seen in the pages of the booklet, reproduced below, which also includes a description of a previous Ship of Fools production “Media, Myth and Mania”, a 1996 CD ROM, state-of-the-interactive-art stuff in those days.

In December 2000, partly as a result of Dreamhouses, we and two other local artists, were invited to collaborate with Hewlett Packard Labs in Bristol in a research project that became an exhibition called ‘Six Small Screens’, at Watershed; this was  part of the uselT Exhibition: ‘A digital exhibition profiling new creative works, interactive prototypes and broadband digital networks’ Copy from their brochure:

“Hewlett Packard Labs in Bristol are interested in art – both as consumers and as technology researchers. Computers have enabled artists to create new forms of art which, at present, are frequently only viewable on a PC monitor [so hard to believe in the 2020s!]. As part of a research project into digital art frames, Hewlett Packard lent local artists six small LCD displays and asked them to explore ways to use them as a medium for their work. The exhibition is the result. The artists are Terryl Bacon, Jon Dovey, Mac Dunlop, Annie Lovejoy, Liz Milner and Martin Rieser.”

Variations of the Dreamhouses work with some new additions were included in the 2000 Cheltenham Literary Festival as part of the Visual Arts strand.Further details of Eurydice and Orpheus at the f-stop gallery and some of the photos used in the installation and in the films

The soundtrack for this short film was created by Armin Elsaesser – more on our collaboration, The Wired Woods, here