Sonic boom

The Expo Festival is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound art scene in the UK. The event mobilises a national network of artists, and engages with communities from all backgrounds. It places sonic art and the people who make it in direct contact with the public by stepping away from traditional venues and inspiring practitioners and the public to reconsider their environments. By relocating annually, Expo disperses into each new locality, joining together place, people and art. Work is national, but the festival collaborates locally. It has developed a community of contributing artists and has encouraged creative approaches to the staging of new work. Expo aims to present serious, experimental and challenging work in a playful, open and inclusive context, encouraging the public to have direct experience of, and access to, the most radical and exciting sound work.

Sonic Arts Network has produced the festival for the last 12 years. The 2004 event began a process of up-scaling that continues to this day. This trajectory has included a greater emphasis on local partnerships, an increase in the amount of new work commissioned and the number of guest artists, and a strong emphasis on working in accessible public spaces. These changes have had a knock-on effect on budgeting, and annual fundraising has increased in relation to the ambition of the programme. Each year, Expo is organised in collaboration with one lead regional partner. These partners have ranged from university departments to a local radio station, and in 2009 will be a public arts consultancy organisation. Administrative roles are split, and an extensive network of additional partnerships is created to include regional promoters who may showcase during the festival, education providers who may work with the festival in widening participation, and local media who assist with marketing. Expo reaches artists primarily through an open call for work issued in the months running up to the festival, which collects both commission proposals and more general submissions.
A key fingerprint of Expo in recent years has been its ability to create a community of artists and producers during the delivery of the festival. This is partly achieved through the numbers of artists involved and attending, up to 80, and the strong DIY aesthetic of the festival. The weekend programme of installations and performances necessitates days of intense activity, and artists meet and share resources to set up and realise their work. In recent years ‘Unconference’, an online wiki-conference (a conference where the participants submit ideas for the agenda on a blog before the real-time event) has helped to build the festival community by encouraging discussion and debate prior to the festival going live. Expo has supported the UK sonic arts community by commissioning emerging artists, providing profile on a recognised platform for the diverse range of national practices that fall under the umbrella of experimental sound, and taking this work into public spaces. The festival allows producers to work on many levels with artists, from supporting emerging artists to commissioning leading international figures, and keeps the producers in touch with their feeder communities in different parts of the county.