A Thing About Machines :: September 24 - 27, 2009 :: Festival Launch Party: 7:00 - 11:00 p.m.:: The Herbert, Jordan Well, Coventry, CV1 5QP.

A Thing About Machines is Coventry’s first and best *OTHER* Art Festival dedicated to local hero Delia Derbyshire exploring art and music that uses, reinterprets, reviews or renews technology invented in the past 100 years..

This year’s festival was inspired by Tangerine Dream’s 1976 concert in Coventry Cathedral (we like unwieldy analogue synths and use of unexpected venues here). We want to explore the relationship Art can have with its surroundings. Transformation of a space, transportation from a place, response to surroundings, interaction and reaction.”

Sonic events include:

Janek Schaefer, British composer of the year, turntablist and sound artist will be performing a brand new commission especially for A Thing About Machines using an FM transmitter and processed samples of Tangerine Dream records. NB Please bring a battery powered FM radio/boombox to fully appreciate this performance.

“Ghosts”, a sonic installation by Barry Farrimond, seeks to explore perceptions of both physical space and physical presence. As audience members make their way up or down the staircase at the Herbert Gallery they are accompanied by various sonic apparitions that ascend and descend with them, walking past or even seeming to pause and listen to the installation when they find audience members doing so themselves, and moving off only when they think no one is there any more. The work invites audience members to question their role in this exchange: Who is listening to who? Who is the installation?

“Binary” by Wil Bolton is inspired by the Victorian wallpaper at Oxburgh Hall, a Tudor manor house in Norfolk. Computer software was used to convert a photograph of the wallpaper into sound, which was digitally edited and processed to produce a haunting atmospheric soundscape. The sound was also transferred back into images printed onto canvas, ghostly echoes of their origins.

And many others!