Glastonbury Festival: A Patchwork of Film and Sound



June 29, 2014
The Binaural sound tent at Glastonbury Festival
The Binaural sound tent at Glastonbury Festival, 2014, © Kate Bailey

How do you capture and preserve the essence of a festival which spans 900 acres with thousands of performers, entertaining audiences of over 120,000 on site, watched on TV by millions?

The V&A has been documenting and collecting stories and imagery from this year’s festival which will become part of the Glastonbury archive and will also be presented in an immersive video installation to be shown at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design in June 2015. Our guerrilla camera crew have been focusing on ways to deconstruct the festival tapestry and seeking ways of capturing the many layers, textures, experiences and themes.

We continue to document the transformation of the festival from an empty site to the buzzing festival city. Our sound designer may be spotted in the field recording the sound of space through 360 degree binaural audio recordings. Our camera crew are looking for the unseen and the seen, as we work to recreate Glastonbury and explore what are the different ingredients that together make this cultural phenomena.

We are grateful to those we have encountered on our journey who have helped make this possible.

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Comments

Hi, I was thrilled to hear that you are beginning to archive the fabulous Glastonbury Festival. We were there for this festival, as we have been for many previous festivals! In fact we were a swarm of bumble bees that one of your crew recorded during the Dolly Parton extravaganza! I wold just like to add that Glastonbury is like a tonic, a quick dose of therapy, that can sustain a person for the year ahead. It is a reminder that the world is full of kind, fun loving people. We were wondering when and how we can access your footage of the festival as we are keen to check it out. Hope you are all recovered from your camping experience and feeling refreshed and revitalised. Claire Beel

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