Digital Arts Studios (DAS)

10/04/2026

Thanks to everyone who came to the launch of our exhibition last Thursday night during Late Night Art!

Blink: the Digital Arts Studios Annual Review continues at PS2 Gallery until 25th April.
Open Tuesday - Saturday, 12-5pm.

BLINK brings together a curated selection of work developed by artists in residence at Digital Arts Studios over the past year.

ARTISTS:
Alannah Bates .ruth
Catherine Chapman Catherine Rose Chapman
Silvia Koistinen .art
Vanissa Law Vanissa Law
Anna Vidamour ANNA VIDAMOUR

BLINK brings together works that explore moments of perceptual slippage, where images glitch, dissolve, or drift. There are no stable truths here, no fixed positions or clear narratives; yet the body returns as a site of orientation, resisting the speed and fragmentation of contemporary culture.
Collectively, these works speak to a present marked by perceptual instability, where digital mediation, sensory overload, and fractured attention have unsettled how we locate ourselves in the world.
BLINK insists that while meaning may be unstable, it is not absent.

Link in bio 🔝


Arts Council Northern Ireland
Belfast City Council
Late Night Art
PS² Belfast

Photo features the interactive work ‘It’s More Fun To Sink Them’ by Vanissa Law.

13/03/2026

We’re very grateful to receive the recent Digital Evolutions funding for organisations from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for our weekly XR Lab programme.

This reel is a short excerpt of a video included in our XR Lab exhibition last year where members discuss how the Lab has benefited their practice. You can view the full length video on our website.

Drop us a message/email for details on how to become a member and participate in our XR Lab programme.

We look forward to another year of supporting artists to excel in their digital art practices and projects.

The XR Lab project is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Digital Evolution Programme for Organisations which has been match-funded by Future Screens NI. Thanks to National Lottery players and money raised for good causes.


and

04/02/2026

Join us for the first Late Night Art event of 2026
Thursday 5th February, 6-8pm.

For February’s Late Night Art, DAS will present The Approach by Angela Halliday. This is the first in a series of works offering audiences insight into the research and creative practices of the DAS team to foster a spirit of peer exchange. The series will also include work by Richard Davis and Catherine Devlin.

The Approach is a film produced as part of the artist’s ongoing enquiry into pictorial representations of the Irish landscape. It considers how we approach the land both physically as navigators of the natural world, and philosophically as privileged viewers of composed images. It locates these concerns against the backdrop of Rathlin Island, which is home to thousands of breeding seabirds during the summer months. They nest on the west coast where the cliff faces open to the Atlantic Ocean. Filmed on water and land, the spaces presented oppress and overshadow.

The Approach is an interrogation of land, identity, and belonging, resonating with themes of exile, migration, and ecological grief. The film features a monologue written by the artist for this film. The speaker, a child, is both outsider and interloper, simultaneously unwelcome and already present. The child’s voice shifts from questioning to assertion, unable to trust in their interpretation of place.

This screening includes a filmed BSL interpretation by Patrick Sinclair.

19/12/2025

Today we’re having a few drinks for our members in our Production Lab before we close for Christmas.

We have had a very busy year and welcomed many, many new faces to the studios through our extensive programme of residencies, workshops, exhibitions, talks, and even a comedy show.

You can read about all of our activities that took place this year in our festive newsletter (Link-in-bio).

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our supporters, whether a casual visitor, artist-in-residence, DAS member, partner organisation, or even that lone comedian. Your support is vital and very much appreciated!

Have a wonderful holiday and we look forward to 2026!
From Angela, Richard and Catherine

19/12/2025

Here is our final newsletter of 2025, filled with an overview of our activities during the past year.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our supporters, whether a casual visitor, artist-in-residence, DAS member, or partner organisation. Your support is vital and very much appreciated!

Have a wonderful holiday and we look forward to 2026!
From Angela, Richard and Catherine.

Digital Arts Studios will be closed from Monday 22nd December 2025, reopening on Tuesday 6th January 2026.

26/11/2025

This Friday!! You're invited to attend a presentation of work by Aiden Brady & Cailean Finn created for Immersive Arts.

Emancipating XR Practice
Friday 28th November, 12-1pm.

Aiden Brady and Cailean Finn are launching their spatialised referenced website for XR practitioners interested in implementing FLOSS techniques in their work. The website includes reflections on the difficulties working creatively in a space gate kept by big tech companies and figments of visual material documenting the possibilities for open-source practices in the XR landscape.

The event is free and open to the general public.
Email [email protected] if you'd like to attend.

Arts Council of Northern Ireland
Belfast City Council

25/11/2025

Late Night Art
Thursday 4th December 2025
6-8pm

Eavesdroppings
A work-in-progress by Una Walker

For this work the artist visited over twenty of the remaining passages couverts de Paris, the cultural significance of which was highlighted in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished 1930s Arcades Project, where she made a series of four channel field recordings. The audio files were then uploaded to a speech to text app which transcribed fragments of incidental conversations captured by the recordings. These fragments, mainly in French, but also Greek and Arabic, were then converted to English using translation software. The resultant texts hint at possible narratives but are detached from context or formal structure allowing many possible arrangements.

Eavesdroppings in its first iteration will present these fragmented and overlapping conversations as a video and four channel audio installation.

Una Walker is an artist and writer based at Flax Art Studios, Belfast. She has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally, making site and context specific installation, audio and video works, and works on paper. Many of these works have dealt with aspects of individual memory and on the construction of collective memory. Site specific installation works have been constructed in diverse locations including: military fortifications in Ireland, Scotland and Finland: a derelict factory in Poland; and a cathedral in Wales. Her audio and video works have been included on numerous broadcasting platforms and in international festivals including In Sonora, Madrid (2024) and Earthrising, IMMA (2025).

20/11/2025

Our current Home Residency application deadline has been extended for a few more days until Tuesday 25th November at midnight.

See link in bio for info and application form!!

08/11/2025

07/11/2025

Open tonight 5-9pm. A unique, immersive work in a stunning space: don’t miss it!

06/11/2025

We’re extremely excited for tonight!

Join us at between 6-9pm to view the incredible work, OBSIDIAN by

OBSIDIAN is a large-scale, site-specific installation by Aoife Dunne, produced by DAS Belfast and presented within the historic Riddel’s Warehouse. The work explores transformation as a state of continual flux, moving between mental and physical spaces, perception and reality, the human and the digital.

This exhibition has been funded by Belfast City Council and is in partnership with Beta Festival Ireland. Beta Festival launches this week so check out their profile for full details.

OBSIDIAN continues Friday 7th and Saturday 8th November 2025, 5-9pm at Riddel’s Warehouse, 87 Ann St, Belfast, BT1 3GH.