FilmBath Festival 2025: Move Ya Body

As part of FilmBath Festival 2025, POLYMATHIC designed and delivered a calm, immersive chill-out space after a screening of Move Ya Body: The Birth of House - "Out of the underground dance clubs on the South Side of Chicago, a group of friends turn a new sound into a global movement."

While Roseberry Road presented a special edition of their Leap & Dance night inspired by the early Chicago house scene, we focused on creating a deliberate counterpoint to the dancefloor: a space to pause, decompress, connect, and reflect before re-entering the night.

The result was a soft, ambient environment that complemented the film’s themes of community, liberation, and togetherness, offering audiences a new way to stay present within the wider club experience.

What We Created

POLYMATHIC transformed Roseberry’s main gallery space into a living digital canvas, combining comfort-led spatial design with responsive generative visuals.

1. Multiple projections driven by custom generative systems made by local computational artists.
2. Visuals sampling vintage house music posters, reinterpreted through algorithmic motion.
3. Subtle lighting design synchronised with the visuals to shape mood rather than demand attention
4. Informal seating and bean bags encouraging rest, conversation, and shared presence
5. Handmade decorative elements, flyers and interactive elements.

The visual works were created by local computational artists datarav3 and Felix Colbert using TouchDesigner, whose systems continuously evolved throughout the evening, ensuring the space never looped or repeated, but gently unfolded over time.

The Spaces That Sit Beside Intensity

We are increasingly interested in the spaces that sit beside intensity. The edges of raves, festivals, and parties where people reconnect with themselves and each other.

For this event we took inspiration from environments like the new natural spaces at Shangri-La, Glastonbury Festival, where rest and reflection are treated as essential parts of the experience, not afterthoughts.

House music emerged from community-led spaces of care, resistance, and togetherness - and this quieter room echoed those values in a different way to the music that shaped the scene.