It's Getting Hot in Here: Media Intercourse at the Signal + Noise Festival

Now in it's ninth year, Vancouver's premiere experimental arts festival Signal + Noise is back at VIVO Media Arts Centre, starting this Thursday night. The three-day festival aims to generate discourse and facilitate creative exchange in response to a theme - this year's being "Media Intercourse". Of course, another goal is simply to entertain, get you thinking and show off some of the outstanding alternative-media artists in our city and from afar.

We have written about this festival a few times before, and not without good reason. These truly are the sights and sounds from out there, the art that percolates underground like the tidal flats of False Creek. Like those flats, every now and then a rising tide will dampen the earth and flood the basements, giving light to a new level of artistry - visually, sonically, even texturally. Now we can add erotic and sensual leanings to this list.

So, what can one expect a collection of artists comprehending Media Intercourse to do with themselves? You might say play, but that's not really intercourse is it? One look at the program gives you a glimpse. There are three parts to this festival - installations, audio diffusion and live performance - all eventually co-mingling with each other and, possibly, making babies by the time Saturday night rolls around.

You see, it's a "celebration of sonic and media inspirations" as their website puts it. A cacophony of "cords, connectors, and couplings" all getting down in the name of expression, liberation, et al. Sounds like the swinging 60's with not a Bacharach in sight.

The installations are up throughout the festival with sex toys making music, looping videos of prolonged mouth-to-mouth action, and a reverse-role fighting game simulation where the point is "shoot to thrill" - not "shoot to kill".

The diffusion portion of the fest goes nightly at 9pm, followed by live music at 10:30pm. Here you will experience artwork in all forms - messy, glossy and downright dirty. Mixed together, pulled apart and reconstituted for uneasy consumption. If it were easy it would be missing the point. You can come at it from many angles, but if you are at all interested in the exploration of sound-as-video-as-space-as-time-as-art, you just better come.

Signal + Noise runs April 17-19, 2008 at VIVO, 1965 Main Street.
Three-day festival pass is $30. Single night options available.

Photo by 14 Giants from the sensuously arty BR Flickr Pool