Cork Ignite was one of Simon McKeowns most ambitious outdoor Live Art projects. It played out to an audience of thousands in the City of Cork on the evening of September 15th as the culminating event of Cork Culture Night 2015. 7-10,000 people of all ages attended. The work has since featured in documentaries, promos and academireview. 

Cork Ignite is dedicated to its sound engineer and designer Nigel Crooks.

The work was conceived as a public artwork, tailored to suit a large and diverse audience. The conceptual appeal of the material, its staging and dramatic effect were serious issues to be addressed and as such the work had to be much more than a single thematic theme. This was not narrative-driven cinema. Rather the work deliberately perplexed and entertained an audience, aged 5 to 80+. Cork Ignite did this using 3 key intertwined themes, taking inspiration from Cork and its history, material from the creative disabled community of Cork and finally manipulation of city and architectural space.  It was a poetical visual and audio work, full of fun and chaos and which surprised, amused and hopefully stunned viewers.

In April 2016 McKeown launched Trace Elements,  a solo exhibition at the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, UK, which documented the learning from the Cork Ignite project and invited viewers to engage with the processes behind projection mapping and the overall event itself.

Please see the PDF below for a review of Cork Ignite, as well as the Press page for press and social media reaction.