Music, digital art intersect in 'Day for Night' festival in Houston

[December 21, 2015]   By Amanda Orr

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Sound, image and digital art installations collide in Houston this weekend for the Day for Night Festival, which brings together music giants including Kendrick Lamar and visual artists such as Casey Reas.

Walls of light, animations projected onto buildings and video installations created by award-winning artists connect three performance stages and multiple warehouse galleries.

"What we’re trying to do is create an immersive experience where moving throughout the festival grounds is as engaging as standing and staring at the stage,” said Omar Afra, the Day for Night festival producer.

Reas, whose software, prints and installations have been featured in galleries globally, will showcase a television signal collage that highlights the most watched shows on a local Los Angeles station projected onto a 20-by-25-foot (6.1-by-7.6-metre) canvas.

"The idea is to create something which is already a visual assault and make it more of a literal visual assault,” Reas said.

On the musical side, New Order, one of the more influential British bands of the 1980s, will take the stage along with other headliners that include the Philip Glass Ensemble, known for its avant-garde symphonies and operas.

Vincent Houze created a structure of gauzy black screens that act as a container of fog and serve as canvases for lava-lamp-like animations of water meant to mimic brain activity after going under general anesthesia. The exhibit will be controlled from his smartphone.

"Millennials are engaged every moment with the screen on the phone, the screen on the computer, video games and we feel like this is a long time coming for the world of music production to catch up with the way young people engage art and music,” Afra said.

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by James Dalgleish)

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