In September Mario Di Maggio – planetarium manager and dome-based art enthusiast – parted ways from Birmingham’s Thinktank Science Museum, taking his awesome Dome Club project with him – Dome Club is now based at the Custard Factory in Digbeth, and has an exciting programme of forthcoming events; I had my first taste of the portable dome experience at the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend (where I ended up sharing in the presentation duties – I thought I was only coming to take photos!) so I highly recommend it as a great way to experience visual content. Many visitors found the experience relaxing, mesmerising, and the dome environment itself strangely womb-like (in a comforting rather than scary way – I think). Many have predicted that viewing films in these sort of immersive environments will be the future of cinema; Steven Spielberg and David Lynch are among the most famous advocates.

When Dome Club started in early 2013, it was an opportunity for artists, filmmakers and musicians to explore the fulldome medium and experiment creating work specifically for immersive environments; it was also an attempt to draw a different audience to the planetarium dome, demonstrating that such environments can be used effectively for content other than science or astronomy-based shows.

My partner and I first met Mario a few years ago (I met one of Thinktank’s directors at a Museums Association event in my curating days; he introduced me to Mario and I introduced him to Michael), and they collaborated several times to bring art to the science museum – Michael showed a number of art installations at Thinktank starting with Data_Sea in 2009, a fascinating piece about the radiosphere. When Mario started up Dome Club, this encouraged me to experiment with fisheye photography – something I had never tried before – and I submitted images and animations to a couple of events, the last being my Pecha Kucha presentation at the 10th Dome Club (read my blog about it here). I was glad to hear that Mario wanted to keep the event going even though he was going freelance, and doubly so when he asked me to design some publicity material for ‘Dome Club 2.0.’

Mario first asked me to redesign the logo, keeping it similar enough to the original to still be recognisable as the same brand, but different enough to reflect Dome Club’s ‘reboot’. Here’s what I came up with (check out the old programmes on the Facebook page to see the difference):

So still very similar in terms of font, style and structure, but cleaner and (I think) a better visual representation of the portable dome’s shape.

I also knocked up a couple of flyers, here’s the one I did for the Pink Floyd events – tickets are still available so get ’em while they’re hot!