The artistic connections between sight, sound and movement will be explored this week at Texas A&M’s Fresh Minds Festival.
The Fresh Minds Festival is an international audiovisual art festival in which the submissions are curated and ranked by Texas A&M students who go throughout a brief orientation. Audiovisual artists use technology to showcase music and visuals in an interactive way.
There were 140 submissions received from 40 countries for the festival’s third season. After the 256 student curators evaluated the pieces, the finalists were named at a 6.4 percent acceptance rate. The actual rank of the finalists will be revealed the night of the work’s screening. Art screenings will run through Saturday. “We’re looking for works that are integrated so much that if you took one of the elements away , the piece would be totally different and in many cases just fall apart,” said Jeff Morris, a coordinator for Fresh Minds.
The opportunity to curate professional pieces is an advantage for A&M students, said Morris.
“They [student curators] are not creating new specific works, but they are joining part of a community that is collectively curating this collection,” Morris said. “And more and more in the art world they are starting to recognize curation as a form of artistic expression itself.”
Sylvia Pengilly, one of the finalists, said the concept of audiovisual art itself intrigues her.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between what the eye sees and what the ear hears,” Pengilly said. “If you listen to the same piece in a different setting, it sounds different, and not just acoustically. The mental impact of it is totally different.”
Pengilly said her piece “Maze” was meant to represent a metaphor for the twists and turns of life.
“You set out trying to find your way through the maze, but you get diverted and you have to come back and then get on the main track again,” Pengilly said.
Another finalist, Dennis Miller, said his piece for the festival took one year to create. Miller said he was inspired by his experience composing classical concert music.
“Of course with the animations, you also have the added medium of the music to deal with, and the fun part is deciding how the two will interact,” Miller said. “Sometimes they go hand in hand — the music gets louder, and the pictures get brighter or start to move faster, but more often they go their separate ways and ‘meet up’ when I want to reinforce their connection to the viewer.”
Visualization freshman Desiree Degollado said she plans to attend the festival every night of its schedule to watch as many different screenings as she can.
“I’ve always been interested in art and mixing it up with music,” Degollado said. “When I was younger, whenever I would listen to music, I would always think of visualizing it. So I want to see what people came up with.”
Fresh Minds Festival will screen submissions from Oct. 6 to Oct. 10 at 7:30 p.m. each night in the Black Box Theatre in the Liberal Arts and Humanities building.
