NEoN Digital Arts Festival: 2018 Preview

Now in its tenth year, North East of North – or NEoN to its pals – is a festival that shines a light on the world of digital and technological art, showcasing work from around the globe in an ever-changing array of formats. Yet, as we improve and advance our technology, we run up against one big mushy bag of problems – human mortality. Handily, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Phillip Andrew Lewis' new work Spirit Molecule I (from 5 Oct) combines botany with biotechnology, considering the possibility of genetically-modified plants acting as living memorials to relatives who have passed away. Dewey-Hagborg explains the project: “We’re talking about how this is one more step; so you could have a plant of your grandmother and live with that and just have a physical interaction and know that that plant has that genetic make-up. But you could also potentially consume it and go into this other state of consciousness."

This year's festival theme is lifespans, and a pair of art exhibitions offer (slightly less literal) perspectives on the subject. Grassroots gallery GENERATOR hosts a group exhibition inspired by the 'posthuman condition', including sculptural works by Alicia Fidler and Caitlyn Main (27 Oct-11 Nov), while Forever and Ever pulls together a series of artists using digital technology, video gaming and computer-aided design to look at our ever-expanding and seemingly-endless digital lives (6-18 Nov). Tega Brain's Being Radiotropic looks at one specific aspect of our modern condition – the endless search for a full signal. Brain's work for NEoN is a series of "eccentric wireless routers," posing the question of how society might bend itself in order to face more directly at the waveforms that let us receive our Facebook messages (6-11 Nov).

The motivation behind many of our technological innovations and inventions is the same – saving time. Y'know, because of that whole 'limited lifespan' thing. Down The Rabbit Hole (6-18 Nov), a new work by Al Holmes and Al Taylor (aka AL and AL), is a site-specific installation at the much-loved Nursery Rhyme clock in the Wellgate shopping centre. AL and AL say: "This clock has inspired Dundee to watch time, mark time. Inspired by this magical timekeeper our installation will take Dundee into our new evolving conception of time."

The musical element of the NEoN programme also heads in some interesting directions. Error System is an exploration of Irish avant-garde composer David Cunningham's 1977 work Grey Scale, a piece which calls for musicians to repeat a simple pattern until they make a mistake. That mistake then becomes the basis of their playing until they make another, at which point that becomes their new pattern to work with; curator Cicely Farrer's new project looks at how the system mirrors the recurring feedback and error loops at the heart of modern technology (10 Nov, 11am). 

Elsewhere, the Tinderbox youth orchestra join forces with the Big Noise Douglas project to improvise a new collaborative score inspired by the music from video games (8 Nov, 5.30pm), and a closing party at the Reading Rooms (10 Nov, from 9pm) that brings together house and disco sounds with the glitchy, sprite-filled visuals of California-based video game artist Cassie McQuater should make for an ideal conclusion to the week.

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NEoN, 6-11 Nov, venues across Dundee