Louise Colbourne

Louise is the course leader for MA Graphic Design within the School of Art. She has also been working on curriculum development across the School of Art and the School of Media and has led on the development and teaching of both theory and practice based modules. As a Student Engagement Champion, Louise is currently working on WiPat funded curriculum development projects in collaboration with students.

Louise also works as an independent arts project director, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary film practices, immersive media, motion graphics and expanded cinema. She uses both analogue and digital methods for the production and presentation of installations and single screen works. 

Having won several Arts Council bids to fund projects which explore the relationship between art, design and  technology, Louise has been able to produce and curate major international exhibitions and events. These projects have been hosted at the Brighton Digital Festival, The Observer Arts, The Jerwood Gallery and the Brighton Cinecity Film festival amongst others.

Louise produces a programme of animation, film, performance and music for the Big Screen at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk each year. She has also put together events for many other exhibitions and festivals to include: Loop video art festival in Barcelona, Liverpool Biennale, Whitstable Biennale, ESPS in St Leonards-on-Sea, and the ICA in London. 

Currently Louise is working on a project called Our Machines and has recently completed a research project in collaboration with The Slade School of Art Research Centre called Motion in Form. This project included a series of exhibitions, workshops and a symposium exploring the specific qualities of analogue film as an expanded form of communication in a digital age.

Our Machines looks at the relationship between technology and the pioneering work of artists and designers. The project brings together a wide range of cross-discipline and inter-generational work that reflects on the role art and design has on humanising technology as much as it questions limit-less progress or the fact that references to the natural world are fast disappearing. 

Time-based media, which by definition is illusionary and non-existent, is also instrumental in asking the viewer to question a world where multiple views of reality are in a state of flux. Looking at immersive and interactive technologies historically, artists and designers are often at the forefront of new experiential epochs, testing and challenging our human relationship to new media.

Machine learning and generative processes are becoming the normative practices of interactive design, this evolution becomes as much of a grand utopian gesture as it does a passive extension of the human experience; perhaps reinforcing our creative powers by amputating our natural ones. Creative practitioners continue to explore new digital territories and whilst doing so are ever more aware of the need to reinvigorate a ‘cyborg manifesto’ for the future.