SONO ELECTRO FESTIVAL 2025

STRUCTURE 03 with Aeolian elements
for Artist Residency at Sono Electro Festival,
St.Leonards on Sea, September 2025

Festival Director and artist James Wilkie invited to us to be artists in residence for the third edition of his sound and art festival Sono Electro, St.Leonards On Sea. 

Sono-Electro is a festival dedicated to sound art, where artists and the public explore place and belonging. Utilising sound and ecological themes, artists re-imagine belonging through performances, talks, broadcasting, workshops, and installations. 

We spent the three days of the event on a large field on the seafront in St.Leonards, which was previously the site of an Olympic size bathing pool, directly opposite the festivals main venue, and built our largest reflective structure to date. The bathing pool site is the only large scale patch of green land across the towns of Hastings and St.Leonards and is earmarked for housing development of 151 new homes, despite local oppostion.

On each of the 3 days we added to the sculpture and erected it at the end of each session for the festival’s audience coming to attend the evenings events, to witness it as a welcoming structure. On Day 3 we affixed elements in order to create an Aeolian Harp, as an experiment in harnessing the wind as a conduit for sound.  

An Aeolian Harp is stringed instrument placed in a window or outdoors, where wind passing over its strings produces a ethereal sound by causing them to vibrate and generate harmonics, named after Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind.

We tautly fixed wire to a circular frame with small plastic cones acting as amplifiers for the individual strings. We also suspended brightly coloured florist tape to a smaller circular frame to create a rhythmic component. The sculpture stood at approx 12m tall, evoking the image of a bamboo pylon or large scale antennae. 

As darkness fell the sculpture became alive with the flashes and lighting of the viewing public’s devices, creating simple interaction, allowing the way the sculpture is viewed and illuminated to be dictated by the audience.

Thanks to UK Bamboo, Flashback Tape and Alex Chetwynd.

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