Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘Music+Art+Technology’
FORMAT Festival something totally new
Editor’s Note: As we do every year, the What’s Up! staff looked back to see what arts stories we published in 2022 that we expect will have a lasting impact on the culture of our community in 2023. This one is April Wallace’s third selection.
In its first year, the FORMAT — “For Music + Art + Technology” — festival Sept. 23-25 promised to fill 250 acres of forest-enclosed green space near Bentonville with some 80 musical acts performing live, including Australian band Rüfüs Du Sol, French indie pop band Phoenix, Beach House, The Flaming Lips, British electronic music project Jungle and The War on Drugs; nearly two dozen installations, integrated performances and art experiences by several well known artists, including Jacolby Satterwhite, Pia Camil and Marinella Senatore; and 14 of Nick Cave’s iconic Soundsuits moving about the event inhabited by humans.
Day One
You can hear the pulsating beats of the music well before you arrive at Sugar Creek Airstrip, no matter how you get there — by shuttle, bike or foot.
Once inside, you’re hit with a zoo of light, sound and color. Festivalgoers are dressed in all manner of brilliantly colored and patterned things: shiny materials, neon swimsuits, an illuminated rainbow cape, a taxi cab driver’s hat. Others have elaborately painted faces, arms wrapped in glow sticks or carry staffs, rockets and more kitschy accessories.
Six stages are on festival grounds. North of Oz and South of Oz are the largest, most traditional of them all, where the biggest names play their sets. DJ sets, local musicians and others took smaller stages and nontraditional spaces at Drag Me To the Disco, The Cube, Smokey’s — placed further into the woods — and Next Door.
The options are plentiful. If you stay to the end of a set, you can look at it one of two ways: you’re either late for something else you want to see, or you’re never without a performance to watch. The War on Drugs played the South of Oz stage to a packed crowd that extended well past the general audience area. French indie pop band Phoenix took the North of Oz stage just after 9 p.m. with an ASL interpreter and played many of their well known hits as well as tracks from their upcoming album “Alpha Zulu.”
During an instrumental track by the band, a pack of drones took flight next to the North of Oz stage. The autonomously flying swarm of hundreds of drones, by pioneering drone artist Studio Drift, was based on a biological algorithm from more than 10 years of research into starlings’ flight behavior.
Day Two
While returning to Sugar Creek Airstrip for the second day of FORMAT, you might notice distinctly blue and green streams of light shimmering into the night sky. Actually, it’s hard to miss.
The aurora borealis-like effect comes from a mirrored hot air balloon installation, “New Horizon” by Doug Aitken. Anchored at the furthest end of the festival grounds, the balloon’s metallic, reflective brilliance, paired with seams of kinetic lighting and colorful projections draws crowds further into the surreal, artistic events
of the night. They just have to see where the colorful light is coming from.
By the time they get all the way to the balloon light sculpture, they might notice that the projections not only change color and pulsating patterns, but are able to make images of clouds in midair. Some might even lay flat on the ground to watch the digital clouds roll by in the night. But as a festivalgoer who wants to take in everything, you have a lot of stops to make. To get to Smokey’s, a venue in a hidden forest enclave, you have to step through James Tapscott’s work, a circular, eclipse-like installation called Arc Zero. From far away, you see the light element smudging visually. It’s only when you walk under it that you realize the site-responsive work is misting the people that walk below it.
Once inside the forest behind it, music lovers are thrown into a venue designed by assume astro vivid focus, an artist duo, one from Brazil, the other from France. The result is something they describe as an adult playground. The stage is neon colored and resembles a creature’s face; artists on stage can be seen inside its big mouth. During performances, lights sometimes form a jagged line like teeth or shoot laser-like beams from its eyes. And you can’t miss the shimmering disco ball glimmering at its center.
Tracing your steps back through Arc Zero and past the hot air balloon you come to a small black box of a place. If you dare to pull back a black curtain and step inside a room as black-as-night, you’ll see a spatial artwork by John Gerrard and Richie Hawtin. The digital simulation produces a video loop of an ouroboros, a snake eating its tail, historically symbolic of infinity or the cycle of life, death and rebirth. It’s shown in combination with techno music to immerse audiences with the music and visual aspects.
As you start to walk past the barn which once stood at The Momentary, you might get pulled in by local drag queen Maddy Morphosis, who hosted the venue renamed “Drag Me to the Disco” for FORMAT Festival. Inside the disco madhouse — aside from the neon green spotlights, disco balls lining the rafters and glitter curtains dividing small seating areas — was live salsa, funk and African disco performances, not to mention lots and lots of dancing.
If you manage to break free, your next chance to dance is one stop down at Solana House, marked by a small forest of metallic cylinders (that stand taller than most people), where live DJ sets happen with digital video backgrounds. Come back during daylight hours and they offer you free snacks, like popsicles and tamales.
Across the way is a three story building called The Cube. Long before you get inside, you can see people enjoying the 4-D sound and augmented sonic realities. The lights reveal the thin, translucent material of the structure’s exterior, making the silhouettes from within a part of its look.
After all the dancing and walking, DomeRx is a welcome stop for legs and minds that need a break. In Darren Romanelli’s 360 Immersive Dome, festivalgoers choose a bean bag to lay back and watch projections not unlike a laser light show while listening to techno and other music.
Once you’ve rested, you might have just enough time to poke your head into one of the holes in Pia Camil’s large fiber artwork, which looks like a ton of T-shirts stitched together. Then it’s back to the live music.
The Flaming Lips — with Nick Cave’s 10 feet tall raffia and hair Soundsuits interacting and dancing at the edge of the stage — Beach House and Rufus du Sol all played to packed audiences on the North of Oz and South of Oz stages late Saturday night into early Sunday morning.
Update
No date has been announced for a 2023 FORMAT Festival.