AV Festival
The AV Festival is the UK’s largest international festival of electronic art, and features new media art, film, music, and games. As with festivals such as Ars Electronica, ISEA and DEAF, it is considered to be a new media art festival
The bi-annual festival takes place in the cities of Newcastle/Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough in the North east of England. The 2006 festival took place in March and went for ten days across three major north coast towns of the UK with events starting at 10am and going till 2am. The 2006 and 2008 Festivals were directed by Honor Harger and produced by Fiona Fitzpatrick (2006) and Michelle Hirschhorn (2008). Tom Cullen directed all technical aspects of the show. The 2010 festival was directed by Rebecca Shatwell.
Themes
Since 2006, each festival has had a theme that loosely organizes the events. Festivals have had the following themes:
- 2006: Life
- 2008: Broadcast
- 2010: Energy
- 2012: As Slow As Possible
Events
Each festival invites and commissions new works from international artists and features world premieres. In 2006 the theme of Life brought a bunch of international digital artists with works such as:
- Celestial Radio by Neil Bromwich & Zoe Walker (with a soundtrack by zoviet*france:)
- Spine by Gina Czarnecki (new commission & World Premiere),
- Wonderland by Claire Davies (World Premiere),
- System C by Marius Watz (UK premiere),
- datamatics by Ryoji Ikeda (new commission & World premiere),
- Who Am I? by UMAMi, Preamptive, Retina Glitch & Grainy Collective (new commission & World Premiere),
- RoboticMusic by Suguru Goto (UK premiere),
- What I Know About Stem Cells by Richard Fenwick (new commission & World premiere),
- Marching Plague by The Critical Art Ensemble (World premiere),
- The Autotelematic Spider Bots by Ken Rinaldo & Matt Howard (new commission & World premiere),
- Autoinducer Ph-1 (cross cultural chemistry) The Phumox Project: Andy Gracie and Brian Lee Yung Rowe (new commission & World premiere),
- Swell by Anthony McCall (new commission & World premiere),
- The Remains of Disembodied Cuisine by Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr (UK Premiere),
- Artificial Worlds V.3.0 by Richard Fenwick (new commission & World Premiere),
See also
- New media art
- New Media art festivals
- Electronic art