Please note that this exhibition has now ended.

TODAY is the last chance to see the retrospective exhibition, KMA – Outside In at Bar Lane Studios in York.

Earlier this week, The Press announced York digital media artist Kit Monkman’s upcoming project with Leeds company Phoenix Dance Theatre.

Today, the focus falls on the past work of KMA, Kit’s collaboration with Tom Wexler, in an exhibition designed by fellow cutting-edge York creative agency The Beautiful Meme.

As the title Outside In indicates, the exhibition documents the outdoor interactive works of KMA in such locations as York city centre, Trafalgar Square and Tate Britain in London and the Shanghai World Expo.

In the field of creative urban lighting, KMA prioritises the illumination of people and their relationships over the lighting of buildings and edifices.

“Rejecting the historical notion of the citizen as a passive spectator, we celebrate the dynamics of human movement rather than the facets of historic buildings,” says Kit.

This work is focused primarily on illuminating, encouraging, and developing interactions between people in public spaces using digitally controlled projections, explains Kit.

“The desire within communities to gather together after dark to enact or watch a drama or ritual lies deep within us,” he says. “It’s part of our ancestral history and surely one of the oldest and most essential of human responses to our shared fate. It’s campfires and shamen.”

Unlike Kit and Tom’s collaborations with other artists in theatre, dance, television, film and academia, the Outside In exhibition of four video projections and accompanying boards of text was put together in double-quick time. “It came about in a very last minute way, around three weeks ago” says Kit.

In a nutshell, Ben Clowes, Bar Lane Studios’ project manager, needed an exhibition of internationally successful York artists’ home-grown work to accompany a conference on art-and-design courses, organised by York St John University.

The Beautiful Meme’s director, Tom Sharp, saw the show on to the starting line while Kit was away in Macau.

“I’ve been doing a recce for a project for the Macau International Arts Festival,” says Kit. “We’ll be showing a piece called Congregation, which we made for the British National Day at the Shanghai World Expo in September 2010.”

Arriving home jetlagged from Macau, Kit found the Outside In exhibition was “pretty much all there”, thanks to Tom Sharp’s curatorial skills. “The four videos basically tell the story of one strand of what we do, which started off with our initial commission in 2005 for Renaissance York.

“That commission allowed us to buy the thermal imaging camera for Dancing In The Streets, which was originally only supposed to be in Davygate for the festival week but they kept it there for four or five months, as people so enjoyed creating shapes on the street from their dancing,” says Kit.

Not only the dancing dervishes of York enjoyed it. The possibilities of KMA’s thermal imaging camerawork came to the attention of American pop superstar Prince, who is employing it on his Australian tour. “He’s using it to create water and fire effects with his body,” says Kit. A sign of the times indeed.