TOOT 99 - Totally Out Of Tune.

As the seventh international ROOT festival this year TOOT is concerned with those edges of art that cross or contradict accepted notions of music, investigating the relation between the sound, the listener and the site.

Hull Time Based Arts expands it's concerns with the time based, the happening now, by proposing that nothing that is temporal can be silent. Over 36 hours of live performance, recordings, broadcast, screenings, discussions and events TOOT is a programme of aurality and visuality.

TOOT brings together an apparently disparate collection of artists and musicians working in a multiplicity of forms. The experience of such work may be emotional, physical or intellectual. We question what it is to be out of tune - to be discordant, experimental, critical, out of line, and off the rails.

Many of the works to be platformed take the audience beyond traditional forms of presentation and recipience by experimenting and pushing the capabilities of old and new technologies, the spaces we inhabit and the language we use to describe our experiences. We are required to consider both the physical real time experience of hearing, and the memory of listening - recognising / deciphering / understanding / comprehending - or not, the things to come.

The programme does not purport to represent a notion of 'cutting edge / avant - garde' or other such labels offered in retrospect. TOOT is the action and interaction, of all those taking part. There is to be no distinction between artist, programmer, audience, broadcaster. It is the meeting of the collective in focused demonstration and discussion which presents sound as meaning and idea. With eyes open the playing or performing of sound is visible.


© mark fell, modified June 24, 2007, at 05:43 PM PDT edit print