Hasta La Ideas

Robot music and a volcano visualization in London’s digital and interactive arts festival

Walking into the recent Onedotzero Festival, you might be forgiven for thinking you’re walking into a romanticized version of the future. Celebrating the best in digital creativity, this year the London event presented a diverse program within its Adventures in Motion subset—such as the stimulating talk from Information is Beautiful‘s David McCandless, as well as radical moving images and beautiful audiovisual installations.

The festival’s Robotica category featured a selection of short films “exploring the ethics and social effects of a world shared with robots and androids.” While mostly dominated by boys with toys and exploding phallic robot animations, Robotica’s exception was the fantastically-conceived video of simple machines making music entitled “Instrumental Video Nine.”

Ultimately capturing everyone’s attention at Onedotzero was an incredible audiovisual installation of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano created by Joanie Lemercier of AntiVJ. Giving the impression of a 3D volcanic wire-frame landscape by light mapping the wall’s 2D surface, Eyjafjallajökull’s power pulled from the fact it never exploded—instead just pulsating with light, energy and sound.