Staff and students from Music and Audio Technology at the School of Arts will be presenting their work at Electric Medway, taking place from the 21 – 30 August 2021.
Following a successful debut in 2020, Electric Medway digital arts festival, returns this summer with an ambitious 10-day arts programme held in a variety of locations, with free-to-see artworks and activities including virtual reality, streamed performances, animation, projection and sound.
Within the programme are two new Festival commissions for Music and Audio technology lecturers – Miso Kitchen (Dr Jackie Walduck, with artist Chloe Cooper) and Whispers of the Past (Dr Aki Pasoulas, Brona Martin, with Andrew Knight Hill), and as part of a showcase, students from last year’s third year will show music videos created in their Collaborative Project module.
Miso Kitchen is a cross-sensory interactive performance projecting live Japanese paper marbling (suminigashi) in dialogue with live improvised music. The artists watch and listen, adapting to one another in real time. They invite the audience to reflect on their own cross-sensory experience of eating miso soup whilst immersed in the swirling sights and sounds.
Miso will take place over Zoom on Friday 20th August at 6pm, and live at Sun Pier House on Sunday 29th August at 6pm, where vegetarian miso will be served as part of the performance.
The geolocated soundwalk, ‘Whispers of the Past’, explores and presents stories from archives from men and women who worked at the Chatham Dockyard before it became a museum. We hear personal accounts, moving stories, descriptions, memories and anecdotes that become vivid and alive again through the voices of those who experienced them. The soundwalk is presented at the Chatham Historic Dockyard, a maritime heritage site, through the free downloadable Echoes app. As visitors move across the site they trigger sounds and memories on their mobile devices creating new resonances with this iconic location.
Place and Play is presented in a virtual gallery, showing music videos created by students studying Music and Audio Technology at the University of Kent. The gallery is a fully interactive space. You can enter as your avatar, and interact verbally and via the chat with others in the space.
Responding to Covid lockdowns and remote creativities, the exhibited works explore disruption, distance, place, perspective, through a creative play of sound and image. Films were shot in Medway, Grain, Portugal, London and Hong Kong. Please note, the exhibition is best accessed using a computer.
Take a look at the full programme of events on the Electric Medway website.