Overview of the festival
The experience of lockdown has highlighted the key role digital technology plays in connecting people to culture. However, there remains a burning need for equality of access to the production, consumption and understanding of digital culture. BDF will play an active, ambitious, accessible role within our city to help shape our collective digital creative future.
Brighton Digital Festival (BDF) is now a biennial programme directed by Lighthouse. The next edition will take place in 2023.
Having taken a hiatus for 2020 to enable our transition, in 2021 Brighton Digital Festival developed a partnership with Hull’s Freedom Festival and the Frequency Festival of Lincoln to produce the Arts Council funded Digital Democracies programme. Together, the three festivals commissioned a range of outdoor digital artworks. BDF remains a community-driven platform that supports and encourages people across the city to experience and explore digital culture.
Our city is home to a thriving digital and creative sector; full of potential and overflowing with talent and ideas. Brighton Digital Festival will continue to harness this creativity and support ground-breaking and innovative collaborations, which are part of the very fabric of our city.
Lighthouse is a Brighton-based arts charity specialising in connecting new developments in art, technology, science and society. For over 30 years, its programme has revealed new ways of presenting artists and the creative industries, how artistic work and practice can cross boundaries and disciplines, and be used as a way of enhancing digital technology and its place within society.
Lighthouse aims to enable BDF to fulfil its ambition to allow different people and communities across Brighton & Hove and beyond to develop new work in new settings – as creators, audiences and participants.
Our supporters
Our gratitude and thanks to Brandwatch, who have, since 2014, sponsored and supported Brighton Digital Festival helping to make over 30 projects happen, and to MPB, the BDF Official Photography sponsor for the festival.