Submerge
Bristol (UK)
Bristol Digital Arts Festival
2016 Artists
Adam Basanta
Adam Basanta is a Montreal-based sound artist, composer, and performer of experimental music. His work traverses sound installations, experimental electronic and chamber music composition, site-specific interventions, and laptop performance. His sound installations have been presented in internationally in galleries, festivals and institutions and have been awarded several international prizes.
Featured in: Into The Deep, Room Dynamics
Al Kalinity
Al has been involved with electronic music since the last millennium, drifting between dancefloor beats and forlorn transmissions from a long forgotten Cold War bunker deep in the desert. While his true love is for corroded abstract electronics, the primal kickdrum keeps drawing him home like a sailor to the sirens. Today, he can be found obsessing over analog waveforms, and entertaining Bristol with live techno sessions.
Featured in: Into The Deep
Chk One
Chk One is a Bristol-based platform for electronic performance and audio experimentation. They host a monthly 'electronic open mic night' where artists can perform electronic music live in front of an appreciative audience. They programme artists using digital tools such as Loopstations, MPC finger drumming, Maschine, Ableton Live and Push.
Featured in: Into The Deep
Circa69
Circa69 (Simon Wilkinson) is a British transmedia artist. His work incorporates audiovisual, installation, virtual reality, electronic music, and online and performance media, often combining all of these forms simultaneously. He often uses transmedia platforms in order ‘to disrupt consensus reality and immerse audiences in experiences which blur the line between truth and fiction.
Featured in: The Cube
Claire Northey
French violinist Claire Northey brings an air of the North African coast to the UK, playing a fusion of European, African and East European melodies with looped beats on violin. Her music is as far away from Western pop tradition as you can get, her jazz/ folk odysseys weave playfully between trip-hop, Eastern European and Arabic influences.
Featured in: Into The Deep
CUTS
CUTS came into the world at the tail end of 2012. Their first release, EP1 came out on Invada in July 2014 attracting critical acclaim. CUTS can also be heard on the climatic scene of Alex Garland’s Oscar nominated sci-fi classic ‘Ex Machina’. The soundtrack recently won an Ivor Novello. Their debut film EXIST is described as an existential journey into nowhere and features narration from graphic novelist Alan Moore.
Featured in: Exist
Daniel Oliver
Daniel Oliver creates awkward performance with unprepared participants, making for an irreverent solo show always on the brink of collapse.
Featured in: The Ascent
e^jwT
e^jwT is a techno and electronic music producer and DJ based in Bristol. He has released on various record labels and is resident DJ at Fnoob Techno Radio. e^jwT DJ sets are performed using Traktor and Native Instruments’ MIDI controllers, and feature live looping, sequencing, re-arranging and effects.
Featured in: Into The Deep
Emmanuel Biard
Emmanuel Biard has previously worked closely with Fabric (London) and as part of Hoya:Hoya (Manchester). He designed the complex mirror setup for Daedelus’ Archimedes, together with David Leonard. Biard gained an international reputation for developing the mesmerising live show for artist Evian Christ.
Featured in: Dive
Fis
Hailing from New Zealand, Fis produces physical, spirited, exploratory electronic music very much informed by his surroundings and connection to the natural world. He performed epic A/V shows on the main stage at Berlin Atonal in 2014 and 2015. His latest album "From Patterns to Details" was released on Bristol/Berlin label Subtext in September 2016.
Featured in: The Lost City
FK Alexander
FK Alexander is Scotland’s Premier Destructivist, whose work forms part of on-going investigative experiments into technological rebellion, the decline of western civilisation, new animal ways and survival. Alexander takes to a space, she owns and transforms it, and the effect is hypnotic. Creation and destruction loom large in her work, as well as the influence of JG Ballard’s modernist novels, and their vision of industrialisation’s slow decay. FK is interested in how to continue when all seems lost.
Featured in: The Lost City
Francesca Fini
Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist mainly focused on new media, experimental cinema and performance art. She lives and works in Rome. The focus of her work is always the narrative power of the body. She performs with her partner Inanna Trillis, an Italian body artist living in London.
Featured in: Into The Deep
Gil Delindro
Gil Delindro is a multidisciplinary artist/researcher working mainly with sound, film, installation and performance. Based upon field research, he uses raw elements and analog processes to create physical and direct sound work, exploring matter vibration through direct touch and electronic processes.
Featured in: Dive
Hellen Burrough
Hellen Burrough is a performance artist living and working in London. She desribes herself as a "lover/fighter/artistt and associate producer at Tempting Failure. Hellen has shown her work at SPILL Festival of Performance, //BUZZCUT// festival and Tempting Failure, and has collaborated with Suka Off, Marisa Carnesky, temp0rary and Dominic Johnson.
Featured in: Ghosts
Horseplay
Described by The Guardian as “Bristol’s best gay dance party”,Horseplay is a queer-leaning art-disco-club with a positive vibe and a fine dusting of glitter and sleaze. Jockeys Pony, Bronco and Jim Carna play a frisky mix of underground house and disco; it’s a party where people can dance without inhibition in a haze of smoke and lasers but it's about more than just amazing music. It’s also about building a community of like-minded people.
Featured in: The Ascent
iLe Flottante
iLe Flottante is a forward thinking electronic beats artist with a passion for electronic music performance. Blending sounds of both old school and future beats, his original Ableton/analogue set is fit for day time chilling or late night bouncing.
Featured in: Into The Deep
Jade Montserrat
Jade Montserrat is a research-led artist. Performing the body is a political tool used to articulate the ideas and ideals of freedom underpinning her project The Rainbow Tribe. The Rainbow Tribe looks at freedom: of expression, covering civil and human rights and the role of recording and preserving history.
Featured in: Into The Deep
johnsmith
When johnsmith was born an atom was fired at two slits. The scientists were surprised to see that the singular atom/john behaved like a fluid wave, and flowed through both. They fired again and watched. Under the pressure of an audience the atom/john chose a single slit. In each performance john crystallises one persona from many possibilities.
Featured in: The Ascent
Knickerbocker
A laid-back party for all sorts of queers. Great music, brilliant sound system, cheap tequila. Come as you are; all are welcome. The Yard is their regular home (London's best party venue) and you can find them at festivals and clubs across the UK. KNICKERBOCKER resident DJs aaronzimbra and Alex Lawless spin alternative pop and cuts of house that you might not hear elsewhere.
Featured in: The Ascent
Koreless
Lewis Roberts (aka Koreless) began making music at just nine years old. A fan of jazz, in particular John Coltrane, Roberts discovered electronic music soon afterwards, and he began releasing material under the name with which he is now internationally known in 2008. His LP, Yugen (Young Turks, 2013), gained critical praise from a wealth of avant-garde electronic music gurus including Mark Pritchard, Gilles Peterson and Benji B. He is now one of the most outstanding artists on the roster of the Young Turks label.
Featured in: Dive
Lorcán Thompson
Lorcán Thompson is a Bristol based electronic artist from Brighton. His recent album Eyppé is a sweeping masterpiece of lush, ambient drone, rumbling bass, warm peaks and soft loops.
Featured in: Into The Deep
Lucy Hutson
Lucy Hutson is a performance artist and agitator whose work questions human nature and interrupts social order. Lucy likes to work with found objects and unloved artefacts. Lucy's work engages with aspects of society that confuse or anger her. Often focusing on capitalism and gender politics, her work manifests itself in interventions, installations, solo performances, film and intimate encounters.
Featured in: The Ascent
Octo Octa
Brooklyn’s Octo Octa (100% SILK / Running Back) produces woozy late night house; her shimmering club-ready earworms have been keeping dancefloors pulsing since 2011. Octo Octa is known for her finely-tuned marriage of exquisite compositional flare and primal dance-floor functionality. She was recently invited to undertake a Red Bull Music Academy residency in Manhattan, and has played coveted gigs at Berlin’s Panorama Bar, Frankfurt’s Live At Robert Johnson, and Barcelona’s Sonar Festival.
Featured in: The Ascent
Olivier de Sagazan
Born in the Congo and based in France, Olivier de Sagazan integrates photography, painting, sculpture and performance to create his mesmerising and existential performances and sculptures. He is most famous for ‘Transfiguration’, a series in which he layers and moulds simple materials onto his own skin, evoking an incredible sense of violence and destruction without actually causing any damage or harm. Sagazan's work has been exhibited internationally, including a performance at the 2016 Shanghai Biennale.
Featured in: Ghosts
Oozing Gloop
The only autistic, green, drag queen (from Norfolk). Oozing Gloop is a trans-aggressive tattooist, tarot reader, and painted lady of Herculean feats who uses a variety of mark making techniques to translate psychic topologies in her eternal struggle against this fantastically cruel world.
Featured in: The Ascent
Philip Bedwell
Philip is a London based Performance Artist. A professional wrestler with a twenty year career, he has also explored cabaret, performing in Marisa Carnesky’s Tarot Drome and burlesque with the Double R Club and the regular show Boylexe. Philip’s work seeks to disassemble what he knew about "how to entertain and emote on a theatrical scale" and to bring honesty and truth to the work.
Featured in: Ghosts
Project O
Project O is the performative fruits of conversations between Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small. The collaboration aims to comment on the fallout from being black, mixed and female, making visible positions of otherness so that they will eventually no longer seem 'other'. It is a project that tries to talk about, and make visible, the awkward stuff of everyday oppression and to move on from this.
Featured in: The Ascent
Rrose
The artist known as Rrose comes cloaked in mystery. A veteran producer with an alter ego who lives for atmospheric industrial sound, but whose other discography straddles experimental house and austere piano compositions, Rrose stands in the shadows on stage, going by he and she interchangeably – an implied interrogation of gender norms and artistry. Her name and alludes to Marcel Duchamp's alter ego Rrose Selavy. Her biography states “Born 1969. Died 1909”
Featured in: Ghosts, The Ascent
Steakhouse Live
Steakhouse Live is a DIY platform for radical performance practices. It’s rough. It’s raw. Unprofessionalism is embraced. Work cuts across performance art, theatre, visual art, cabaret, sculpture, dance, drag and participatory performance. Steakhouse Live has produced and curated around 30 events and worked with over 120 artists. They have independently produced annual Steakhouse day Festivals of Live Art from 2013.
Featured in: The Ascent
Stefan Goodchild
Stefan Goodchild has toured the world making real time interactive and reactive video art, primarily for large scale concerts. He has worked for many international artists including LCD Soundsystem, Peter Gabriel, Glass Animals, Pulp, Pet Shop Boys, Queen and others. His audiovisual work is often patched and improvised live, with modular analog video and audio equipment.
Featured in:
“The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards into warm pellucid depths, where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist.”
- J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World 
