The Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Arts has been around in Sheffield for 10 successful years. The festival explores digital arts in interesting environments around the city such as the Showroom Cinema, galleries and other community spaces. Lovebytes kindly gave Cube some free passes this year so I decided to go along to see what it has to offer.

The festival has a bit of something for everyone from the world of digital arts. There are multimedia exhibitions, digital film and animation screenings and the most unusual, weird music performances! Anything digital goes at Lovebytes and it proved to be a great way for people to explore creativity using today’s latest technologies.

Digital film screenings I saw the film screening ‘Animating the city’ which showed bizarre, interesting and disturbing matters in urban life. There were nine different films from ‘Nuclear Train’ to ‘What a woman wants’ and all were completely different. My favourite film was one called ‘Dads Dead’, a gruelling film exploring rural teen life. Two teenage boys were good mates until one started doing nasty things like robbing a blind man. It cleverly used animation with real life film.

Exhibitions
There was a real range of creative exhibitions showing the unusual ways media arts can be exhibited. There were some real bazaar ones like my personal favourite called Q3APD. This exhibition showed a virtual battle, like WWIII in a virtual matrix world. Junebum Park was another must see. There were little TV screens buried in walls showing aerial view videos of urban landscapes over laid with giant human hands. The hands appeared to be moving cars and things about. Very odd. Also Squid Soup was a fascinating experience were you put on 3d glasses and walked around a space not knowing what was going on, until you finally realised when you get closer contact with a human the music gets faster and louder. All done with your own movement, weird or what.

Music performances There were a range of music performances but the one I really wanted to see was Christian Fennez. He is a keen guitarist, as am I, so wanted to see if digital technology and a guitar work together. In a darkened cinema his distorted shadow was projecting on the wall. He turned to his laptop and the madness started. He played his guitar along with the strange guitar samples on his laptop. To some it may have been a monstrosity of noise, but to me it was an interesting combination of guitar riffs in a new style of music.

I asked Janet Jennings Director of Lovebytes what she thought the festvial has to offer young people, she told me “I think it’s good for young people to come along and see what you can do with computers and see where you can go with them. Some students from Abbeydale Grange have got involved in a workshop doing VJ/DJ and they might not have known you can get a job doing that in the future. You’re not stuck doing what’s called ‘normal’ jobs anymore. There’s jobs in media and in art, it’s about raising people’s aspirations and awareness”.

So for the next Lovebytes Festival, make sure you’re there. Lovebytes isn’t anything to do with vampires in love, it’s for anyone interested in the future of art, music and technology! Check out www.lovebytes.org.uk for more info.

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