Whole Festival

Thur 29th Sept to Sun 2nd Oct
“Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley”. Walter Benjamin

“Imagination augments the values of reality”. Gaston Bachelard

Herein Newcastle attempts to address the danger of Augmented Reality in homogenizing and rationalizing spaces. Using vignettes of images, sound, and poetry via QR-codes to navigate the mythic spaces and poetic encounters of the city Josh Harle attempts to reactivate the imagination as a faculty through which we experience our surroundings.

Participants require a mobile phone with a QR-code reader app (free), and web access.

Artists
Josh Harle

Venue
Outdoors

Thur 29th Sept to Sun 2nd Oct
“Electrofringe in Newcastle” brings together a variety of electronic, experimental and new media artists from Australia working with artforms to be presented within the gallery environment.

Artists
Samuel Bruce, Robert Crispe, Danny Ford, Mitch Goodwin & Stephen Campbell, Louis Pratt

Venue
The Lock-Up – John Paynter Gallery

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Thur 29th Sept to Sun 2nd Oct
Over the four days of Electrofringe, Lauren Brown will actively listen to and publicly post all the sounds heard at the festival. Data mapping meets performance art.

A site-specific performance in which the act of listening becomes performative. The sounds of public life are attended to, bringing them to being through listening.

At Festival sites and around selected parts of Newcastle City during the festival, the artist will stand, listen to and note the ambient sound. The act of listening documents the site in terms of its sound, brings to being those sounds (in the vein of ‘if a tree falls in the wood… ). Those sounds become lists and annotated on a large billboard in the city. They become a sound map of the Festival as it unravels over the weekend. Sound becomes public, private and public again.

Artist
Lauren Brown

Venue

Thur 29th Sept to Sun 2nd Oct
A combination of wearable architecture and sound fashion, this work is a pop-up concept store of garments that accentuate or extend our gestures and posture for listening.

Held in a retail space on the main streets of Newcastle, the store is a stapled-together mixture of conceptual art and warehouse clearance outlet.

Garments for Listening is an installation that combines fashion and sound. whereby fashion as a means of altering gesture and pose is applied to behaviour around sound and public life. It pushes the wearability of sound technology away from gadgets and into fashion structures, and combines it with a healthy dose of philosophy and straight-up cheekiness:

Earrings hung from the ceiling, shoes to accentuate the foetal position in a chair, oversized hood/canopies to disappear into during electronica madness and collars for resting your head on after the aria.

Artist
Lauren Brown 

Venue
7 Newcomen St, Newcastle

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