SightSonic Festival

I spent a very enjoyable but tiring weekend at the SightSonic festival in York a couple of weeks ago, and haven't really had the time until now to make a report on what went on there. I was exhibiting as part of the 'Artists Platform Expo', which was a sort of group show by emerging digital artists at York St John's College.

There was some interesting work on show as part of the expo. I was particularly interested in the work of George Eksts who presented a really interesting piece which sat somewhere between photography, video and animation. I was very keen on the lack of thematic resolution, and the sense of temporal stasis that the piece conveyed. Other artists whose work caught my eye included Ruth Hinckel-Pevzner, whose literary inscribings over found footage seemed to have a lot of potential; Megan Smith, whose piece of work was interesting but not as successful as the piece she exhibited as part of the Immediate show (sorry); and Jonathan Green, a composer who creates work using traditional instruments and new technologies.

I didn't get to see too much else of the festival, unfortunately, except for Christian Fennesz's performance at the National Centre for Early Music. I was more interested in the visuals, to be honest, created as they were by Jon Wozencroft. It was very floaty stuff, very temporal, and quite beautiful, with lots of images of running water, sunlight glinting on waterways and so on. But, as the visuals were replaced by bluescreen on the projector before the end of the performance, it became clear that they were nothing more than eye candy, having no relationship with the sound other than an arbritrarily thematic one.