The AV Festival is the UK’s newest and largest, international festival of digital arts and music, electronic art, games, film and new media. AV Festival 06 is about vibrant audio and visual experiences, experiences that will entertain you, maybe frighten you and certainly make you question the way the modern world is turning out to be.
The theme of AV Festival 06 is life – though it’s life not quite as we know it. You will see the very stuff of our existence portrayed, remixed and even made from scratch by some of finest international artists in the world and by some of the talented artists that we have right here in the North East of England. We have art happening in galleries, clubs, concert halls, cinemas, schools and even on the outside of buildings across the region.
Why is the festival exploring life? Because advances in genetic engineering, bioscience and nanotechnology that not long ago seemed purely the stuff of science fiction are now real. On top of that we are all already increasingly swapping our ‘real’ lives for artificial realities, lived virtually in online communities and games. And a great deal of this is happening right here on our doorstep. A hundred years ago the North East of England was the crucible of technical innovation in the industrial revolution. Today, we are at the international leading edge of the biotechnical revolution, with pioneering work happening here.
Many of the world’s leading artists are already grappling with this science and it has implications for us all. LifeLike AV Festival 06 will remind us all that life is so much more than just breathing in and out!
These are some of the projects presented, while you can find the complete program on the website of the event:
– Robotic Spiders Installation by Kenneth Rinaldo
– First-ever Audio Visual Concert by Michael Nyman and Northern Sinfonia
– Robot Orchestra Concert by Suguru Goto
– Bio-Terrorism – the World Premiere of The Marching Plague by CAE
– New Commission by Ryoji Ikeda
– First Ever Site Specific Exhibition by Anthony McCall
– Organic Outdoor Projections by Marius Watz
– Two-Day International Symposium