It's that time of year again when the North-East of England sees the biennial AV Festival descend upon its streets for a week. Working feverishly over the preceding fortnight, I managed to get involved by writing a piece of music for the festivities being held in Newcastle's Culture Lab, as part of the Music & Machines VIII conference. My resulting contribution was a 4.1 9-minute piece called Reception.
This year the symposium shared the AV Festival's theme of Broadcast, featuring a variety of lectures, presentations and interventions by various key writers, artists and musicians. In between the scheduled presentations, artists from Newcastle University presented a series of installations and performance pieces taking inspiration from Jeffrey Sconce's notion of Haunted Media, using sample material sourced from Antonin Artaud's Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, a recording originally commissioned by Radio France sixty years ago for a broadcast that never was (unsurprising, given the blasphemous and and somewhat scatological subject matter).
Other highlights of the weekend for me were Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec's Reality Soundtrack and Tetsuo Kogawa's Deconstructing Broadcasting.