Text by CLOT Magazine
Since 2019, L.E.V., the International Festival of Audiovisual Creation of Gijon, has expanded to Matadero Madrid, an ample space in Madrid (Spain) for interdisciplinary creation that is the perfect location to host experimental and electronic sound creations, digital art, and extended realities. L.E.V. Matadero has completed a programme addressing contemporary electronic and digital creation from September 18 to 22.
Highlights from the shows and audiovisual performances for the sixth edition include playwright Romeo Castellucci, who will showcase with Scott Gibbons the performative installation The Third Reich, a performance blending visuals and sound that critiques the rigidity and constraints of contemporary language. AXONTORR will present the audience with a live audiovisual experience of melodic and deconstructed compositions played with the instruments they created. With her singular voice, Keeley Forsyth will play her new album, The Hollow, live.
On Friday, 20, our highlight is, on the one hand, an avant-garde spectral pop merged with movement and voice in a performance by plus44Kaligula with scenography by Emmanuel Biard. On the other one, percussionist, sound manipulator, and visual artist NAH will showcase the audiovisual spectacle Totally Recalled, a whirlwind of samplers and unique percussive rhythms.
On Sunday 22 will take place two world premieres featuring the most experimental techno: Matadero by Horma and multimedia artist Azael Ferrer and Recycling Techno by German engineer Moritz Simon Geist, where he uses discarded mechanical and electronic pieces to generate repetitive sound structures and sound patterns.
The Ciudad Aumentada section explores the new narratives emerging in this field of artistic creation. This year, they will feature Peder Bjurman’s Slow Walker. This augmented reality tells the story of a tardigrade, a microorganism highly resistant to environmental hazards that turns into a gigantic, mystical being. The creature can be viewed through the screen of our smartphone with a voiceover and a soundtrack created by Abul Mogard.
This year, the Vortex section will consist of three 50-minute pieces, which will be shown at Central de Diseño. These pieces will allow the audience to immerse themselves in new virtual worlds and endlessly experiment with digital media’s new artistic possibilities. Hsin-Chien Huang and Jean Michel Jarre will showcase The Eye and I, a collaborative piece exploring social surveillance. Kevin Mack’s Namuanki will take the audience to an aquatic oasis made of labyrinthine geological structures and strange forms of living and subterranean caves. And Darren Emerson’s interactive and virtual documentary In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats will take the visitor on a first-person trip back to the epicentre of the late eighties rave culture in the UK.
In collaboration with Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Economic and Taipei’s Trade Office in Spain, L.E.V. Matadero opens the exhibition PIXEL GODS. Taiwán digital, a selection of works by three Taiwanese artists who reformulate the pixel concept. In Gods of Water, Kuang-Yi Ku explores human transformations and our desires and emotions in the context of technological advances and climate crisis. Chen Zi YIN’s video installation How To ImprovePhoto Quality by AI | Noise Reduction, Super-resolution Tutorial shows the story of Blue Pixel, the famous A pale blue dot picture taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1. The exhibition is completed with Team9‘s video game Words Game, an interactive piece whose visual elements are composed of giant pixels representing traditional Chinese characters.
One more year, L.E.V. Matadero presents a series of free-access audiovisual installations in different spaces of Matadero Madrid: Studio Encor’s Alcove LTD, a 6-meter recycled container as a canvas to create a moving light box capturing the reflections of the audience; Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials, an immersive film set in the city of Los Angeles which combines ecological theory, speculative fiction and posthuman game design to explore the politics of drought and water shortage; Robbie Cooper will showcase Immersion, a video installation showing people from all ages immersed in digital media; and, Save the Planet by INITI Playground, an audiovisual installation, interactive and playful that uses mapping and movement detection technology. Finally, L.E.V. Matadero will include the hackathon Avatar VR Sculpting managed by Rick Treweek, aka MetaRick. He will guide various sessions from September 19 to 22 in a hybrid format from the Metaverse, explaining different VR Sculpting techniques to build avatars.
L.E.V. Matadero in Madrid (Spain) will run from September 18 to 22. Tickets are available here.
