Exclusive Digital Experience of Elijah’s Yellow Squares Come to Life
On Wednesday 24 January, 2024, a groundbreaking event took place at the Old Market in Brighton. Part grime set, part lecture, part immersive installation, Elijah’s Yellow Squares came to life in an exclusive, hybrid, digital experience of Make The Ting 360º.
Thanks to the support of world-renowned digital arts charity Lighthouse and independent venue The Old Market, the event was commissioned and recorded in full length for the first time ever. The exclusive recording is now available to watch online, along with an animated highlights edition and an exclusive interactive 360º video, offering audiences an elevated level of access and interactivity.
The performance, titled Make The Ting 360º, was a unique leap from live to digital, showcasing the collaboration between Elijah, Lighthouse, and The Old Market in aligning emerging technologies with established means of connecting and collaborating with audiences. This was a remarkable feat considering the current cultural landscape.
In December 2023, Elijah’s Yellow Squares made their 360º debut at The Old Market, funded by The Space, a national organisation that supports the cultural sector to be digitally innovative. The performance was well-received by a lively audience in the round and was followed by a series of exclusive videos, unique to the scene in its innovative, immersive, and original take on performance.
One audience member described the event as “exciting, accessible, inspiring, and brilliant”, while another praised it as “interesting” and “beautiful” for bringing people from all walks of life together to learn and collaborate.
The event featured an interactive lecture experience, a live grime MC set with Jammz, and immersive, 360º technology that enveloped the venue in Elijah’s Yellow Squares. The team also incorporated new dimensions of experience by live streaming through Meta glasses, experimenting with hybrid performance structures and reinventing what “immersive” can feel like for an audience.
Make The Ting 360º is a fresh take on traditional live events made possible by The Space, an organisation committed to facilitating accessible, digitally innovative work across the cultural sector while connecting artists with diverse audiences. The full-length video captures the collaboration between grassroots arts organisation Lighthouse and independent venue The Old Market, with the suspension of the 360º camera from the ceiling providing a perspective rarely seen, as the audience’s live reactions are recorded in real-time.
This capture process was shared with the 2024 cohort of Lighthouse Young Creatives, providing the next generation of artists and thinkers with unique insight into immersive binaural sound, audio edits, and the intricacies of 360º viewing platforms. Additionally, an animated video of Royal T’s digital work, also accessible online, brings Elijah’s Yellow Squares to life in a slick 10-minute highlight reel, adding further depth to the once static work.
As Jammz shared, “this was just one iteration” of the experience, with the event becoming an experiment in how we engage with the work from both ‘inside’ and beyond the yellow square; a process that will continue well beyond the immediate scope of the work.
Elijah, the London-based writer, DJ, artist manager, and co-founder of the iconic record label Butterz, speaks of his experimentation with performative formats and “taking the squares out of Instagram and X into real life”. He finished the event by writing one-of-one statements on the aptly blank yellow square of his vinyl albums.
Elijah has been sharing his 15 years of experience in and beyond the music industry through his Yellow Squares, a digital phenomenon that has made its way offline into both a lecture series and an eight-track album created with Grime MC, Jammz. Titled “Make The Ting”, the album was written and recorded in just seven days, with each track exploring the Yellow Squares as a gesture towards creative freedom and digital experimentation, with over one hundred listeners “remixing the ting” and producing their own original responses to the work.
Lighthouse, a charity that supports artists who use digital technology in their work, played a significant role in the event as the Associate Artistic Director (2017-18). Their mission is to nurture the next generation of diverse, talented, creative people working with digital art and innovative creative technologies and support them to become leaders themselves, building a richer cultural landscape for the future.
The Old Market, the co-commissioning partner and host venue, is Brighton and Hove’s independent venue, started by artists and run by a team of creatives. They encourage risk-taking and present new voices and innovative concepts, with a passion for seeing things in new ways and creating fresh, relevant experiences to engage, excite and inspire a diverse audience.
The Space, the funder of the event, is the UK’s leading digital agency working in the cultural sector. Their vision is to support arts, cultural and heritage organisations across the UK to
Derick is an experienced reporter having held multiple senior roles for large publishers across Europe. Specialist subjects include small business and financial emerging markets.