Working in partnership with the Shangri-La Glastonbury Festival team, over the summer of 2010-2012, UP Projects commissioned a series of contemporary art installations which toured UK music festivals.
Integrating new commissions into the festival environments developed new audiences for contemporary art, raised artistic quality at the festivals and pushed the boundaries of what the audience and artists themselves expected to experience from these events.
At Glastonbury Festival 2010, digital artists Squidsoup created an Augmented Reality game, projecting psycho-bugs that had intelligence, and which responded to visitors who tried to play with them.
Motion graphics studio The Darkroom used video mapping and projection to transform the Central Hub of Shangri-La into a neon urban jungle, created to scale so that visitors to the space could populate the scene in which a narrative unfolded.
Jim & Max Woodall (artists from Cut Collective) developed an installation that evolved throughout the festival, offering a constantly changing backdrop to the Hub area using hoardings, drilling and poster-work. In 2011, Jim Woodall & Brian Warr developed this piece further, creating Postapocadylic Circuits. Based loosely on verbal descriptions of raves from '88 - '94 in Matthew Collin's book 'Altered State', they created a setting that resembled Piccadilly Circus after an apocalypse and attempted to create a visualisation of the feeling of ecstasy using a large collection of irregularly shaped lightboxes.
Artist/architect collective Studio Weave created a giant architectural, glowing sculpture that visitors could lounge, climb and dance on.
Tom Wilkinson exhibited his piece Light Wave, a stunning kinetic sculpture which appears to be made from liquid glass.
We wanted to be the sky by Tim Etchells is a large scale text work, in the form of carnival sign. Letters picked out in coloured lightbulbs that stand out against the sky across various festival sites.
Tai Shani’s, extraordinary An encounter with the supernatural is imminent, was a psychedelic sci-fi story about time travel. Told by a single performer, who interacts with illustrative hologram film, the intimate performance used the Pepper’s ghost technique with video projection and was presented inside a mobile Orpheum Theatre.
Untitled (Box Light) by Dan Coopey was a giant interactive, kinetic light box comprising hundreds of coloured discs delivered in collaboration with Jail-Make. Festival goers were able to customise the composition of the blocks into whatever pattern, shape or arrangement that took their inspiration.
Contemporary Art at Festivals was commissioned in partnership with Shangri-La Glastonbury Festival and funded by Arts Council England.
