Brighton’s earsthetics

Starting this week, the earsthetic season celebrates the crossover of digital visual art, music and performance with a lineup including potty-mouthed, progressive pop Princess Peaches; sound designer and musicial Mira Calix; visual artist and musician Planningtorock and electronic composer Olivia Louvel.

One of the event’s main draws for us is an appearance from Ryoji Ikeda, who will be performing his datamatics [ver.2.0] piece.

The work, as with much of Ikeda’s previous output, uses pure data as its starting point, taking software and harddrive code and transforming it into an AV masterpiece – all hypnotic sounds, synapse-twirling 3D vistas and light.

The programme is produced by Brighton Festival programmer Laura Duccesci.

‘My mission is to investigate music as art’, says Duccesci. ‘I feel very strongly about the interdisciplinary stuff – that’s the premise of the programme.

‘With [Ryoji Ikeda’s] datamatics what I like about the work is that the scale is phenomenal – it’s very visual and very sonic – but it’s not like an assault, it’s very beautiful. With the pure data, it’s very mathematical, but with the huge soundscapes you can sort of zone out’.

Another artist who blurs the boundaries of the aural and visual is Mira Calix, the Warp-records signed artist who creates sound design installation works and electronic music.

Duccesci says, ‘My attraction to Mira Calix’s work is that its very much electronic, but within the work it’s incredible beautiful’.

For earsthetic, Calix will be presenting a piece within the theatre space that explores the ‘photovoltaic conversion of energy of light into electricity’, we’re told, where sound is created by gently ripping paper.

Earsthetic runs from 10 – 14 December at Brighton Dome, Church Street, Brighton BN1 http://brightondome.org/whats_on/earsthetic/