Dan Holdsworth: Acceleration Stuctures

Dan Holdsworth: Acceleration Structures

We're thrilled to be presenting 'Acceleration Structures' a video installation by artist Dan Holdsworth as part of the 2026 Dreamy Place festival. This will be the first showing of Holdsworth work in Brighton. 

Using photogrammetry, a pioneering "cameraless" technique, Holdsworth combines intensive fieldwork with high-end studio software to build three-dimensional wireframe models of the glaciers, translating painstaking on-site measurement into virtual space.

The work sits in a long tradition of artists harnessing new technology to expand what we can know of the world — a lineage Holdsworth traces back to the English invention of photography itself, by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. Acceleration Structures extends that history into the twenty-first century: a forensic, unsentimental record of how humans have shaped, and will reshape, the land — rendered as a strange and singular poetry of data.

This year's Dreamy Place Festival turns its focus to environment and ecology. Holdsworth's glaciers — vast, ancient, and visibly in flux — offer a striking counterpoint: landscapes read not through romance but through data, at the exact moment their futures are most in question.

About Dan: 

For over 20 years, the British artist Dan Holdsworth has been blending art, science and nature to produce works which challenge our perceptions and reinvent the notion of landscape.

Holdsworth was born in 1974 in Welwyn Garden City, England. He studied photography at the London College of Printing (1998), and has exhibited internationally including solo shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Barbican Art Gallery, London; and group shows at Tate Britain, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His work is held in collections including the Tate Collection, Saatchi Collection, The Denver Art Museum Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Dreamy Place 2026

Dreamy Place returns to Brighton from 23–25 October 2026 with a city-wide programme of art, creative technology and moving image. This year’s festival explores nature and our changing relationship with the natural world, bringing together artists working with scientists, ecologists and environmental professionals, and using creative technologies to reveal, interpret and reimagine the environments around us.

Produced by artists’ film and digital culture agency videoclub, Dreamy Place presents outdoor installations, exhibitions, film trails, sound and dance works, talks, performances and workshops across Brighton, with many events free to experience.

Find out more: dreamy-place.com