Robbie Thomson and Louise Harris on Sonica's Festival 2018

Every other year, Sonica brings a world-class menu of visual sonic arts that present contemporary artists for whom technological innovation is a primary part of their work. Some of the artists leading projects that will take place around the city this August have shared details of the ambitious work that make up this year’s programme, part of Festival 2018 in Glasgow this month.

“I knew I wanted to do something in a tunnel,” Robbie Thomson says. “I started looking for sites, originally at abandoned sites.” Then the Clyde Tunnel was suggested. “I had thought it would be an amazing spot, but that it was a bit of a dream that they would go for it.” For Thomson, the work – Portal – then followed from being able to present in the Tunnel, particularly the sci-fi and mythological elements that he draws out of the architectural details like the concrete shuttering and chamfered corners on the tops and sides of the walls. “[The Clyde Tunnel] looks like something that could be out of a Stanley Kubrick film.”

The narrative itself also draws out some of the symbolics of the tunnel form: “There might be a sense of trepidation as they enter.” As Thomson often works with robotics and kinetic sculpture, he was interested in interacting with all the different kinds of behaviour and ways of walking in public. “It feels like the audience will enter the first sculpture’s space, it’s looking for you and finding out who you are. As you are moving on into the centre, you pass that threshold and you get to a watery centre, as it becomes deeper and darker.” Then there’s “a serene and crystalline world based on coral forms and reefs and the types of behaviour of the robotics change as they’re used to your presence.” For Thomson, it acts as a metaphor for getting through the worst of something and making it to the other side.

For Louise Harris' Visaurihelix, there’s again a journey but this time it is up the tower at the Lighthouse, an early architectural work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. “It’s a half an hour long piece made up of recordings that I’ve taken in five different Mackintosh buildings around Glasgow and further afield," says Harris. "They’re woven into an electronic music piece that lasts half an hour. It’s built into five movements, and each movement of the work is a direct touch mapping from a particular Mackintosh design into a chord structure that evolves over a period of time. It’s very heavily tied to a lot of Mackintosh buildings, design and ethos generally.”

In particular, Harris has set up very particular geometric themes to speak to some of the angular and linear simplifications that makes up part of Mackintosh’s legacy. “Strung across the tower at five different levels are copper rods that turn the tower into a giant glockenspiel, and people can wander up and down, hit it with beaters or bow it with bows. It makes sounds that are complementary to the fixed composition that is played across speakers along the tower. The way that the copper rods are positioned, they overlap and intersect with each other as you look down and they make these very geometric shapes that are very reminiscent of Mackintosh.”

Along with these projects, keep an eye out on George Square for Pivot by Australian artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey: it's a playground of “giant, semi-intelligent talking seesaws”. Across all of the completely free events and commissions, Sonica creates new and genuinely surprising encounters with even the most recognisable Glasgow landmarks.