More than 40,000 visitors are expected this year between 1st to the 30th September. And a number of well-established conferences and workshops in the festival have already sold out such as dConstruct and Reasons to be Creative (previously Flash on the Beach), which attract an international audience.

The Brighton Digital Festival presents leading digital artists, designers and writers such as David Blandy with his Odysseys exhibition and Nancy Mauro-Flude in Error_In_Time(), plus influential digital professionals including Ethan Marcotte, Remy Sharp, Lyza Gardner and Jonathan Snook. The confirmed schedule of events is online at www.brightondigitalfestival.co.uk.

The festival covers a range of themes that bridge the art and digital worlds, such as pervasive gaming, shifting our perception of reality through digital art, perspectives from a female ‘geek’ and consumer demands of technology. The Brighton Digital Festival also features opportunities for people in the city to participate in activities such as the festival’s opening event on Sunday 2 September, PixelPyro created by artist Seb Lee De-Lisle, in which the audience trigger a digital firework display projected onto Jubilee Library.

Family orientated, interactive events throughout the festival include the return of last year’s immensely popular Mini Maker Faire. Celebrating the Maker movement, this inventive and creative faire asks those attending to explore the do-it-yourself creation desk and discover new digital inventions. Bigger than last year and even more exciting, the Mini Maker Faire promises to be a highlight of the Festival. The iSpy Brighton Family Treasure Hunt also invites families to a treasure hunt around Brighton using the iTreasure app and GPS.

Embedded at the heart of the festival is an integrated education programme, with workshops devised by Lighthouse and the extraordinary Cherokee Nation, a project developed by Wired Sussex which links young people in Brighton with young people within the Cherokee Nations. A teacher-led event TeachMeet shares great teaching ideas through digital technologies in order to engage students and support learning.

The festival also has its fair share of social entertainment, such as the science fiction and fantasy pub quiz Geekest Link, which invites a variety of digital festival goers to celebrate all things digital and explore their inner-geek.

Essentially a grass-root led, community-run celebration of digital culture, the Brighton Digital Festival is organised by an array of arts organisations, creative digital companies, individual designers, developers, artists and community groups from Brighton and beyond. The festival reflects Brighton’s unique culture and strong community spirit, alongside its immense cluster of digital businesses, which brings together companies, professional digital workers and artists. This year’s festival is supported with an Arts Council England Grants for the arts award.

Sally Abbott, Regional Director, South East, Arts Council England, said: ‘I’m delighted that we are supporting the Brighton Digital Festival for another two years through Arts Council England’s National Lottery-funded Grants for the arts scheme. In the space of a year, the festival has galvanised the arts and digital communities into action and has matured into a major event for the digital sector: bringing together the world’s leading arts and digital practitioners, thinkers, makers and activists as part of this month-long international digital culture festival.

We are especially pleased to support the Festival’s innovative arts and education programme, which aims to support the national curriculum by inspiring young people to use digital creativity and offering teachers new opportunities to learn digital skills. The Arts Council has a firm commitment to the digital agenda and the opportunities it brings to artists and arts organisations to present and promote the arts in new and inspiring ways, and we are excited that the Brighton Digital Festival will continue to cement the South East’s reputation as a leader in digital culture.’

Laurence Hill from Wired Sussex and Festival Manager for the Brighton Digital Festival stated ‘this is the second year of the Brighton Digital Festival and it’s bigger and better than ever. I have been overwhelmed by the response of the arts and digital communities in Brighton to our call out for events.

With over a hundred events during September there are amazing opportunities for people to get involved, learn, play and generally be inspired. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s coming up and I want to say a huge thank you to all organisers of the individual events. Without their enthusiasm, excitement and willingness to develop their ideas into fully-formed events, the Festival wouldn’t happen.

The arts and digital communities in Brighton are world class and the Festival gives them the opportunity to come together, recognize their value to each other, their worth to the city and create a genuinely unique and fantastic showcase for themselves and Brighton’.

Visit www.brightondigitalfestival.co.uk for more information.