The Magic Lantern Project was a part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site Discovery Days event designed to showcase the fact that the Derwent Valley Mills is one of 830 (and counting) sites throughout the world with World Heritage Site status.
As the birthplace of the industrial revolution it was here in the Derwent Valley that the essential ingredients of factory production first came together.

The Magic Lantern Project started with a series of workshops run by myself and Sarah Laman who organised the whole event and runs Fleet Arts in Belper,Derbyshire.

Sarah organised and ran hand made slide making workshops for children, where, working on an amazingly small scale, the children produced a huge number of wonderful pictures to a very high quality.

I organised and ran a number of video creation workshops for older children as well as video workshops for adults in the evenings. Using projected images of both historic Belper and other World Heritage sites from across the globe such as The Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, The Great Barrier Reef and The Taj Mahal, participants came up with some very effective hands-on image manipulation allowing them to shoot video of themselves and their shadows travelling through time and space. We also recorded some of the young adults voices for use in the ambient quad soundscape I created for the event.

I used a live webcam image layered over a slow 'walk' towards the bandstand filmed in daytime for one of the facet screens. The webcam was located some way around from the screen it was projected onto and after its discovery, visitors added some wonderful live 'ghost' images of themselves into the installation.