White Night Festival

Night-time Fixations @ The Phoenix Gallery

On October 25th 2008, between the hours of 7:00pm until 7:00am as part of the White Night Festival, Phoenix Brighton, the largest and most eclectic hotbed of creativity in the city created a night of experimentation. The Beatabet Collective offered 13 hours of experimental art, including performances, music, installations and anything else that fixated us...

Below is a list of what we showed:

Visual Response: New Zeland artist Mike Hawkins performed a visual-response live-action painting to improvised music from five or six musicians.

One to Eight: Multi-amp surround sound performance taking the audio feed from one musician and splitting it 8 times; each identical live feed was manipulated, edited and morphed by eight separate sound artists positioned all around the space. Artists: Beatabet Collective ensemble

Trimachinochord: Sonic performance by Dave Meckin with his award winning electro-acoustic instrument trimachineochord (somewhere between a hurdy gurdy, a guitar and a robot). The instrument is designed so as not to have to use amplification as the vibrations from the strings are transported to metal sheets. It is operated using a light-box, blocks of wood, a computer and many arduinos. An extraordinary invention.

Memories: Spanish movement artist Pepa Ubera performed the the third part of her triology “Memories”. Teaming up with musician Jules Arthur and sound artist Xahdrez, the performance included live violin and viola, max/msp manipulation and contemporary movement.

Bunty: Vocalist extraordinaire Bunty uses one mic, one fx box, one loop pedal, and her vocal chords to create diverse and beautiful sounds ranging from abstract drones to dancehall belters, and everything in between.

Torcher: Investigating communication through a surround-performance involving torches, darkness, live musicians and dancers. Artists: Beatabet Collective ensemble

Billy Whizzball: An interactive sonic ball-game. Artists: Xahdrez, Jules Arthur, Dave Meckin

Sleeping Session: Improvised, drone-based musical performance with cushions and ovaltine... Artists: Bunty, Jules Arthur, Abraham Mougrahbi, JS Thornton

Beatabet Cinema: a late-night video session running through a choice selection from the Beatabet Collective's summer residencies.

AngrySam: live poetry interspersed through out the night from the founder of Hammer and Tongue and long-time Beatabet collaborator

Live soundtrack performed to old super 8 footage of Brighton: musicians Man Ray Sky, video collation: Jay Thornton and Mark Benton

Metaluna: Live Visuals all night.

Midnight Confessional: Social networking, You Tube and blogging has created a generation of people who's first choice of confidant is their computer. A weekend of debauchery follows the usual monday morning blog confessional. This installation is a tounge-in-cheek exploration of today's digital priests. Tell it your sins, some of these may appear on the screen as you speak. Whatever they are, you can be assured of complete digital absolution. Artists: Metaluna, Ed Chivers and Jo Bramli.