|
As festival director of something called Optronica, I’m always getting asked what the project is all about, and how it developed. For me it’s really the culmination of 15 years of work. In the early 90s, as an impressionable 20-something, I relocated to London from my hometown of Paris, simply to immerse myself in the UK arts and music scenes. Enthralled by the emerging digital arts scene in London, I set about organising nights where I screened non-mainstream music videos along with more ambient and experimental cross-media work to audiences hungry for highly creative offerings. As the scene blossomed under the Cinefeel banner, I began curating digital art and music videos for many festivals internationally. And, I became interested in what could best be described as contemporary visual music. |
 |
Optronica—Visual Music on the Big Screen – Françoise Lamy
As festival director of something called Optronica, I’m always getting asked what the project is all about, and how it developed. For me it’s really the culmination of 15 years of work.
In the early 90s, as an impressionable 20-something, I relocated to London from my hometown of Paris, simply to immerse myself in the UK arts and music scenes. Enthralled by the emerging digital arts scene in London, I set about organising nights where I screened non-mainstream music videos along with more ambient and experimental cross-media work to audiences hungry for highly creative offerings. As the scene blossomed under the Cinefeel banner, I began curating digital art and music videos for many festivals internationally. And, I became interested in what could best be described as contemporary visual music. Difficult to categorise, this niche material went unnoticed by the mainstream; even many of the most progressive digital arts and music festivals that I worked with over the next decade only scratched the surface. By 2005, I’d been working with audiovisual artists and the producers of Addictive TV for something like five years and we’d often bemoaned the lack of a credible festival dedicated to AV artists, particularly in the UK. When an opportunity came up to create an event with the British Film Institute, I immediately knew that we should do it; develop an audiovisual festival exploring contemporary visual music in all its many forms.
Although visual music itself was historically not a formalised movement, it was, and is, an important undercurrent and motivating force in contemporary art. When a purist argues that visual music defines itself by its adherence to musical analogues, and that much looser music led animations, abstract pop promos and experimental films, are really something else, they may well be right, but does it matter?
Optronica, although we use the strap “visual music for the big screen” to give an at-a-glance idea of what the festival is, is not just about modern visual music. I see it as a wider genre, which continues the visual music tradition, but that has grown to include the wide range of styles and practices that audiovisual artists, animators, experimental filmmakers and collaborative multi-media groups employ today. The range of artistic endeavours we’re bringing under the Optronica banner is wide: film remixing, colour music, DJ:VJ collaborations, as well as both modern and classical music alongside visuals inspired by early 20th century abstract painting and experimental film. So artists predictably come from a wide-range of disciplines: graphic design, filmmaking, music producing, fine art, digital art, computer graphics and programming.
Artists, including international DJ and designer Trevor Jackson and filmmaker Peter Greenaway, will be performing audiovisual shows at Optronica in March 2007, and it’s great to see artists of their calibre now creating shows in this field. Another interesting example is a Forma produced show that we’re putting on with leading New York video artist Charles Atlas and electronic music pioneer Christian Fennesz. Having names like Greenaway and Atlas getting into mixing video live is very exciting for the audio/visual or, to a degree, the VJ scene. But it’s not just big name artists moving into the genre that make it so exciting right now, there’s also a wealth of artists who’ve been in the game a while, and we try to showcase the best of these too.
Addictive TV, who produce the event with me and our partners at the British Film Institute, have worked at the forefront of the audiovisual genre for many years now, with their performances, their TV projects and DVD releases, etc. Through my work with them, I’ve often ended up at interesting events all over the world. In fact, last summer, I went to Boston when the Addictive TV guys were performing at the SIGGRAPH 2006 event, and there we saw a great act called Reactable; a state of the art electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop interface allowing collaborative audiovisual performances. Several performers can play the instrument by moving physical artifacts on the table surface. It was so innovative that we had to book them for Optronica!
Our next edition runs during March and, as with the 2005 event, we’ll again feature several world and UK premieres at the BFI London IMAX, which is an amazing venue at which to put on gigs. Obviously, it’s not normally a performance space, but the sound system is fabulous, the screen is the largest in Europe and the only downside is that we actually have to build a stage. The BFI have been genuinely supportive of what we’ve been doing with the festival; a mainstream arts organisation whose primary concern is film that embraces something close to a music festival is pretty cool.
We’re always trying to bring artists who’ve never played in the UK before too. Reactable are a good example of this, so too is acclaimed Japanese audiovisual artist Ryoichi Kurokawa who’ll be coming in March as well. He’s previously collaborated with the likes of Sketch Show and Ryuichi Sakamoto. At the last Optronica, we brought over Skoltz_Kolgen from Canada, who perform a fantastic audiovisual show but, amazingly, had also never played in the UK.
Although our emphasis is on live performance, we have talks, workshops and screen a lot of incredible work from all over the world; our cinema programme, “Optronica on Screen” is a collection of contemporary audiovisual work, showing different aspects of the genre, mainly around the idea of visual music. At the next Optronica, we’re hoping to have an illustrated talk on historical visual music, courtesy of the Center for Visual Music in LA; as well as talks on synaesthesia and art.
So it’s pretty wide ranging, what we cover, and we try and further the development of the actual scene itself, and not simply be just a showcase event. The fact that we have leading artists like Addictive TV as festival directors means artists get taken seriously. It’s important for us to make Optronica an event for artists as well as audiences. DJ Spooky had the UK premiere of his Rebirth of a Nation at the last Optronica, and in an interview I read afterwards, he said, “I checked out the whole festival and it is amazing. It lets you know that it is not just about audiovisual material, but an entire way of thinking about creativity.” And that sums up Optronica nicely for me too!
