Musica Universalis
A series of kinetic sculptures, each rotating a light source and a speaker, whose oscillations drift in and out of harmony across the room.
View Musica UniversalisThe post office: laser grids, kinetic light, VR and hair
The second edition moved into the decommissioned Barbara Jordan Post Office downtown, a building whose long sorting floors and loading bays gave the visual programme rooms of a scale no gallery could offer. Houstonia's photo essay from the weekend judged that the visual art was as much a draw as the music, and its captions map the floor: VT Pro's Bardo among the most popular installations on the ground floor, crowds gathered at NONOTAK's Highline and SHIRO, Tundra's laser grid Outlines, Shoplifter's Ghostbeast, AV&C and Houzé's Phases, LIMB's Octa, Damien Echols's Crimson Lotus and Alex Czetwertynski's Blurware.
Björk Digital, the multi-room virtual-reality exhibition, was the most publicised presence and drew the press coverage that framed the year. Around it the programme widened its reach: United Visual Artists debuted Musica Universalis, a kinetic light-and-sound instrument; Golan Levin's Ghost Pole Propagator II and the twenty-year-old Ezra Miller represented two generations of computational practice; and Free Press Houston published its own catalogue essay, “The Art of Day for Night”, two weeks before the doors opened. The festival's own film, Making Day For Night 2016, records the build.
“the visual art was as much a draw as the music.”
A series of kinetic sculptures, each rotating a light source and a speaker, whose oscillations drift in and out of harmony across the room.
View Musica UniversalisA 2,500-square-foot site-specific environment of hidden fencing, tangled synthetic white hair, sound and projection.
View Ghostbeast
An immersive grid of red laser lines and a dark sound field that the audience walks into.
View OutlinesMotorised mirrors and procedural imagery linked into one audiovisual system; revisited by Free Press Houston as a virtual exhibit in 2017.
View Phases
A multi-room exhibition of Björk's virtual-reality and digital works, the most publicised presence of the 2016 programme.
View Björk DigitalNeon glyphs and sigils in a darkened room: the writer and artist's first large installation.
View Crimson Lotus
A mirror, light and ambient-sound installation by the returning studio; Houstonia photographed crowds gathered at it.
View Highline“I want people to experience a new form of reality.”
A site-specific structure of projectors and light that stood as an installation and served as the stage for NONOTAK's live audiovisual performance.
View SHIROAn interactive light architecture that tracks the audience's position and answers it; one of the ground floor's most popular installations.
View BardoA site-specific projection on the wall facing the Red Stage: a live camera feed of the performers transformed in real time by a generative shader network.
View StreamAn excavator covered in pillows and used as a projection surface: natural forms and software imagery across padded machinery, between hardware and software, waking and sleeping.
View Blurware
An interactive laser projection that reduces the movement of passers-by to stick figures and propagates their traces across the wall.
View Ghost Pole Propagator IIA large-scale organic projection: a great living shape, like a plant, that blurs the line between physical and digital life.
View HYBRIS
Illuminated reflective attire worn by performers who moved through the festival as living, site-specific sculptures; photographed by Katrina Barber.
View Reflector Suits