From April 27 to 30, with the support of Gijón’s Town Council and y the Principality of Asturias, the festival will host a four-day line-up in different spaces of the town, around the electronic sound experimentation and contemporary audiovisual and digital creation.
One more time, the festival will feature audiovisual performances and live shows by more than twenty local, national and international artists, both true flagships and young talents in these fields of creation.
Among them, we can find such outstanding names as Robert Henke, Hélène Vogelsinger, Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmitt, Grand River, Kathy Hinde Annabelle Playe & Alexandra Rădulescu, and Claraguilar, who will play at Teatro de la Laboral; Throwing Snow, Zoë McPherson & Alessandra Leone, Ninos du Brasil, Kai Whiston, and Enxin/Onyx, at Nave de LABoral Centro de Arte; or Ikonika, WaqWaq Kingdom, Komatssu, James Shinra, and Jailed Jamie ft. Helios Amor, at Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies.
To the artists already confirmed now we can add the composer, producer and violist Astrid Sonne and the multidisciplinary creative Samuel Organ. Both will play on Sunday April 30 at midday, at Jardín Botánico Atlántico, in a new live show format with wireless headphones, a collaboration with Fundación EDP.
One of the most important events of this year will be the closing act, on Sunday April 30 at Teatro Jovellanos. For this event, the festival brings back one of the most outstanding audiovisual works from the last years: the live-media performance Dökk by Fuse* studio.
L.E.V. Festival will also show three audiovisual installations, which may be enjoyed from April 27: Faces by digital art studio Iregular, at Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto; and OPTX.drips by Maxime Corbeil Perron and Hardly Working by Total Refusal at LABoral Centro de Arte.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 28, also at LABoral Centro de Arte, audiovisual artist Kathy Hinde will give a talk about her creative process and the work behind performances such as Twittering Machines, which she will perform live the following day.
Besides, in synergy with the Arenas Movedizas project, at Escuela de Comercio the audience may immerse in two virtual reality experiences awarded in several and prestigious film and contemporary audiovisual creation festivals: From the Main Square, directed by Pedro Harres (Brazil), and Goliath: Playing With Reality, directed by Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla.
Day tickets and Friday+Saturday tickets available here
L.E.V. Festival (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual) celebrates its 17th year in Gijón from April 27 to 30. With the support of Gijón’s Town Council and the Principality of Asturias, once more the festival will turn the Asturian town into the epicenter of electronic sound experimentation and contemporary audiovisual and digital creation, with a four-day line-up in different spaces and cultural centers, featuring audiovisual performances and live shows, plus multiple art installations and activities around extended realities.
After announcing the line-up of live shows and audiovisual performances at Teatro de la Laboral, Nave de LABoral Centro de Arte, Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies, and Teatro Jovellanos, with such outstanding names as Robert Henke, fuse*, Ikonika, Throwing Snow, Hélène Vogelsinger, Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmitt, Zoë McPherson & Alessandra Leone, Ninos du Brasil, or Kai Whiston, now the festival reveals the rest of names of this year, adding two new live shows at Jardín Botánico Atlántico, by Astrid Sonne and Samuel Organ, a collaboration with Fundación EDP; three audiovisual installations by digital art studio Iregular (at Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto (CCAI)) and by Maxime Corbeil Perron and Total Refusal (at LABoral Centro de Arte); plus two acclaimed virtual reality experiences at Escuela de Comercio, in synergy with Gijón’s project Arenas Movedizas.
New live show format at Jardín Botánico Atlántico with Astrid Sonne and Samuel Organ, a collaboration with Fundación EDP
L.E.V. kicks off a new series of concerts and sound actions at non-conventional spaces, to be celebrated in different formats and locations in the following months. Its first big event will take place in this 17th L.E.V. Festival.
The chosen location for this first event will be the Laguna Boreal in Gijón’s Jardín Botánico Atlántico, a space we had been using until 2019, and now we are taking it back with two live shows on Sunday 30 April at midday, in a new format the audience will enjoy through wireless headphones. Through a radio frequency signal, the attendees may move away from the stage up to 300 meters and keep on enjoying the sounds and the environment without losing any sound quality nor creating any negative impact on the surroundings. All of this thanks to a close collaboration with Fundación EDP, aligned with their values of environment sustainability.
Astrid Sonne, composer, producer and violist based in Copenhagen, will delight the Botánico audience with her sound experiments, combining electronics with baroque music and jamming passages integrated in her compositions with a high degree of accuracy. Her latest album Outside of your lifetime includes ten tracks, ten sonic spaces where the individual dematerializes into a sphere of keys, strings, vocals and buttons.
Samuel Organ, multidisciplinary artist who mainly works with live instruments and sound design, will present a meditative but sonically varied blend of ambient, classical and electronic sounds. Some of his latest collaborators are such famous artists as Caroline Polachek, Sega Bodega, Danny L Harle, Iglooghost, BABii, Shygirl, or Donna Missal. He is also founding member of the experimental jazz group The Physics House Band.
Audiovisual installations by Iregular at CCAI and Maxime Corbeil-Perron and Total Refusal at LABoral Centro de Arte, and talk by artist Kathy Hinde
This year’s L.E.V. Festival line-up of audiovisual installations is formed by three pieces by renowned international creators. Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto, in a collaboration with the Department of Culture of Gijón’s Town Council, Embassy of Canada in Spain and Québec Office in Barcelona, will show the interactive installation Faces, created by the digital art studio Iregular, based in Montreal. Using artificial intelligence, this work tracks the facial features of the people standing in front of the screen, and afterwards it unifies and align them to generate a constantly changing single 3D digital portrait.
Together with LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, L.E.V. Festival presents the piece OPTX.drips by Maxime Corbeil-Perron at LABoral’s Laboratorio de Sonido. A collaboration with the European project RIT (Realities in Transition), the Embassy of Canada in Spain and the Québec Office in Barcelona. This double-screen audiovisual installation creates a work of multimedia archaeology, taking elements and textures from the now obsolete anaglyph stereoscopic technology, the same used by old 3D red/cyan glasses, revisiting it using current digital technology to transform flat surfaces into optic membranes full of relieve and depth, resulting in an expressive and abstract aesthetic.
Also, together with LABoral Centro de Arte and in collaboration with EMAP, LABoral’s Galería de Exposiciones will show Hardly Working, by multimedia Austrian collective Total Refusal. An audiovisual installation with a clear political content, where the main characters in the film are NPCs, non-playable characters who always play supporting roles in video games. Digital extras who don’t play any relevant roles in the plot, but whose work is analyzed with ethnographic accuracy in this piece. The audience observes how the actions of a washerwoman, a groom, a sweeper and a handyman don’t generate any change, product or social benefit; but these actions are performed in the story to keep up appearances and to guarantee social order.
In addition to these two installations, the L.E.V. Festival programme at LABoral Centro de Arte will include a talk on Friday afternoon, April 28, by British artist Kathy Hinde, in which she will delve into her creative process and the work behind projects such as the audiovisual performance Twittering Machines, which she will perform live the following day at the Teatro de la Laboral.
Virtual reality experiences with Arenas Movedizas at Escuela de Comercio
In synergy with the project of experiments about audiovisual culture Arenas Movedizas, organized by the Youth Department of Gijón’s Town Council, in a collaboration with the European project RIT (Realities in Transition), which explores and supports alternative creation of XR and promotes new narratives and processes in this field, once more L.E.V. Festival includes free-access works of extended realities in its 2023 line-up, which will be shown at Gijón’s Escuela de Comercio. This year we will have two multi-awarded pieces of animated, interactive virtual reality.
One of them is the experience From The Main Square, directed by Pedro Harres (Brazil) and created with an international team of 14 countries. Using the main square of a new town as a stage, the spectators will witness the rise and fall of a diverse society which ends up completely divided. A thriving civilization, with all its contradictions, that turns into something dangerous for itself.
The audience may also immerse in Goliath: Playing With Reality, created by Anagram, directed by Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla, and narrated by actor Tilda Swinton, who guides the visitor through the different realities of Goliath, a man who has lived most of his life isolated in mental institutions, and who connects with the outside world through multiplayer video games.
Besides all these activities in collaboration with L.E.V. Festival, Arenas Movedizas’ own line-up will also include the premiere of a new painted wall at Escuela de Comercio, created by Asturian artist Juan Díaz-Faes, with an outstanding international career, widely recognized for the bustling patterns of his paintings, urban painted walls and sculptures.
COMPLETE PROGRAM HERE
L.E.V. Festival 2023
April 27-30 | Gijón
www.levfestival.com
@levfestival #LEVFestival
An initiative by Datatron
Supported by Ayuntamiento de Gijón y Principado de Asturias
Promoted by: Fundación EDP
Partners: RIT (Realities In Transition), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, EMAP (European Media Art Platform), Arenas Movedizas, Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura, Embajada de Canadá en España, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Madrid, Fundación Japón, Oficina de Québec en Barcelona, Silencio Sonoro, Conseyu de Mocedá de Xixón, Radio 3, OCIMAG, CLOT Magazine, La Salve, Organics by Red Bull.
Spaces: Teatro Jovellanos, Teatro de la Laboral, Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto, Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies, Escuela de Comercio y Jardín Botánico Atlántico.
Graphic design: Pasajero37 / Motion design: Holke79 / Sound design and music: Jorge Haro
