Big Screen and Big Sound: A Cutting-Edge AV Festival Is Coming to Melbourne

Curator and performing arts programmer Brad Spolding still remembers his personal “eureka moment” with experimental AV. It was a decade ago at the Montreal audiovisual arts festival Mutek, which has been running since 2000.

“I was really struck by how you could immerse people in this practice and do something pretty remarkable,” the multi-platform curator says. “When it comes together, it can be quite moving. It’s a practice you can take to a big, diverse group, including people who are interested in visual language and people who are interested in music.”

Spolding hopes to reach this audience cross-section with Double Vision, a new three-night program merging live music and visual art in novel ways in the intimate ACMI Cinemas. Running from July 3 to 5, the event offers something different each night, the idea being that visitors can check out all three events or just one.

For him, the important thing when curating Double Vision for ACMI was to show the diversity in how artists are approaching their audiovisual practice. The first of the three nights focuses on Melbourne techno artist Honeysmack, who’s been performing around the city since the 1990s, and Jani Ho, who grew up absorbing house music in New York.

“We’ve got video material out of the ACMI archive that was used as backdrops in early-’90s rave parties in Melbourne, like [the long-running] Every Picture Tells a Story,” says Spolding. “So they’re doing live, improvised techno to this pre-existing footage.”

Then on Friday night, Los Angeles-based Australian expat Tom Hall will appear with Mo H. Zareei, who performs as mHz. “They make all of the music and audiovisual material themselves,” he says, “and they operate a lot of it live onstage. That’s more of the classic AV stuff. Tom builds a lot of the systems that AV artists use. In his work, you see a real closeness between the audiovisual material and the music he has composed.”

The program concludes on Saturday with a night headlined by Penelope Trappes, an Australian artist based in England who released her fifth album, A Requiem, in April. In addition to performing her own combination of music and visuals, Trappes will be supported by Peter Knight and composer, sound artist and clarinettist Aviva Endean, who will play wind instruments through an array of electronics to live score the experimental short film Mystic Park by John Hewison of local filmmaking collective Dogmilk.

“We’re demonstrating the different ways artists approach audiovisual materials,” says Spolding. “Some people will use archival footage, some people will mix AV live onstage along with sound, and some people are collaborating with [dedicated] AV artists. We really wanted to show the breadth of how people work.”

Just as crucially, Double Vision will showcase AV as a distinct, affecting artform, rather than just a backdrop to live music. Visitors can expect innovative and immersive performances each night, while seated in some of the best cinemas in the city. And a special sound system will be brought in for the festival, ensuring a state-of-the-art audio experience to match the visual components.

Prior to Double Vision’s Melbourne debut, Spolding presented a couple of incarnations of the project in Queensland while he was the arts program director at Brisbane Powerhouse. The most recent version was tied in with the travelling International Symposium on Electronic Art, held in Brisbane last year. Australia isn’t as well represented as other countries when it comes to audiovisual programming, but Spolding sees potential for growth.

“In Australia it’s an emerging artform, but overseas it’s quite established,” he says. “There’s Sonica in Glasgow and Atonal in Berlin, and Mutek now has branches in Tokyo and Mexico.”

When it comes to local practitioners of the AV experience, Spolding points to composer and laser artist Robin Fox as the best known by far. He also singles out some recent programming at Melbourne’s Now or Never festival and certain artists coming out of MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio).

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