Dome Club (2012 - present)
Dome Club is a 360° digital dome entertainment
experience created by Mario Di Maggio in 2012 while manager of
Thinktank Planetarium.
On being placed in charge of the UK's first purpose-built digital dome in 2006, aside from delivering standard planetarium content, Mario almost immediately began collaborating with artists to fully exploit the capabilities of the new fulldome medium.
His inspiration was the SATosphère (Montreal, Canada), and by the time Mario left in September 2013, Thinktank Planetarium had produced a significant amount of original creative content, including the invention of a new art form.
The name Dome Club was coined by DJ Food (Kevin Foakes) after he visited the planetarium in June 2012 to experience the 360° cinema for himself. He was so impressed by what he saw, he was inspired to create a 50-minute fulldome 'music video' for his album The Search Engine - the world's first full-length 360° show for a new album.
Kevin Foakes allowed Mario to keep the rights to the name Dome Club, and Mario trademark registered the name in November 2013.
On being placed in charge of the UK's first purpose-built digital dome in 2006, aside from delivering standard planetarium content, Mario almost immediately began collaborating with artists to fully exploit the capabilities of the new fulldome medium.
His inspiration was the SATosphère (Montreal, Canada), and by the time Mario left in September 2013, Thinktank Planetarium had produced a significant amount of original creative content, including the invention of a new art form.
The name Dome Club was coined by DJ Food (Kevin Foakes) after he visited the planetarium in June 2012 to experience the 360° cinema for himself. He was so impressed by what he saw, he was inspired to create a 50-minute fulldome 'music video' for his album The Search Engine - the world's first full-length 360° show for a new album.
Kevin Foakes allowed Mario to keep the rights to the name Dome Club, and Mario trademark registered the name in November 2013.
The
Dome Club experience started coming together in
earnest in 2011, a watershed
year for Thinktank Planetarium.
In
March 2011 we hosted the 2nd UK Fulldome Film Festival
(aka Fulldome UK), in May we began regular
screenings of Pink
Floyd - The Fulldome Experience, and in October
we put on the first Domeheads Tripnotic event.
Dome
Club events took place in the evenings and attracted
new audiences to the museum. We made available free training
for fulldome content creation and loaned the planetarium
fisheye camera to enthusiasts. User-generated content was
projected on the dome at every event, as well as student
work from Birmingham City University next door. We
screened content from international fulldome festivals and
progressive digital domes around the world, and ended each
evening with a full-length creative 360° film.
Below
a few of the weekly Thinktank Dome Club programme
leaflets, including the penultimate one censored by
management.
In
the penultimate leaflet I referred to an article called 'People
are biased against creative ideas', from
the journal Psychological Science. Yet on
getting wind of this, Thinktank management prohibited me
from publishing it.
So
instead, the penultimate leaflet looked like this:
By
mid-2013 Dome Club had captured the attention of
local Arts Council England (ACE) officials, and the
local ACE Dance, Digital and Museum Relationship Managers
each came along to experience the event for themselves. They
were impressed and supportive, and encouraged Mario to apply
for significant ACE funding to help establish Dome Club
as a permanent fixture at the museum, including the creation
of a separate branded planetarium entrance on the third
floor.
By
now Dome Club had become the eighth most popular
Birmingham visitor attraction on TripAdvisor
Yet instead of embracing this unique opportunity - and
despite Thinktank Museum being in dire need of 'alternative
income streams via entrepreneurial initiatives' - in
September 2013 Thinktank management chose to disband the
planetarium team and make Mario and one of the two
presenters redundant.
Sadly
this short-sighted attitude towards creative initiatives is
common in UK planetariums / science museums and has not gone
unnoticed. British singer-songwriter Mike
Batt discovered this in 2014 when no UK digital dome
was interested in screening his stunning 360° production Voices
in the Dark.
Happily
the Dome Club initiative at Thinktank encouraged a
few planetariums around the world to launch their own
versions of the event and attract new audiences to their
museums.
Of
course I wasn't going to let my redundancy (which in
retrospect turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise)
bring an end to Dome Club.
I
used the money from my Thinktank settlement agreement to
purchase a 7m inflatable dome, and continued running Dome
Club events in Birmingham at The
Custard Factory (in the Old Library, January
2014) and The
Q Club (May-August 2014). The capacity of the 7m
dome was 30 adults (lying down) and almost all the
screenings were sold out. The success of the mobile Dome
Club would not have been possible without the hard
work and support of Yaz
Alexander.
In
September 2014 I moved to Bristol - and from then on the
mobile Dome Club experience has been available via
my business Immersive
Theatres. It has been booked by music
festivals, art
centres, university
conferences, business
social events, university
balls, birthday
parties and even private
homes.
In
March 2016 I changed the name of my business to Dome
Club Ltd (trading also as Immersive
Theatres).
It
was of course a great shock to be made redundant from
Thinktank Science Museum, particularly after all
I had accomplished with the planetarium alone, not to
mention the entrepreneurship of Dome Club.
Thinktank
Planetarium had become recognised worldwide as a leading
progressive digital dome, and as soon as my redundancy was
announced protest letters of support were sent to Thinktank
/ Birmingham Museums Trust by the International
Planetarium Society [letter];
IMERSA, the organisation for Immersive
Media Entertainment Research Science & Art [letter];
the Jena International Fulldome Festival [letter];
and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research,
with whom I was collaborating on a fulldome film about dark
matter [letter].
Nevertheless,
as two of the many supportive emails I received below
predicted, establishing my own mobile digital dome business
has been a wonderful adventure, indeed placing me in a far
better place - financially, emotionally and creatively.
The
Thinktank Dome Club web page, as it was in August
2013
