Festival review: Sonica, various venues, Glasgow

Who’d have thought a piece of spinning string could be so unutterably beautiful? It was that, strung between floor and ceiling in Tramway’s cavernous main hall, that provided the focus for Italian artist Michela Pelusio’s mesmerising SpaceTime Helix (*****), one of the high points in the opening weekend of the Glasgow-wide Sonica festival of visual/sonic art. In her infinitessimal adjustments of light, colour, sound vibrations and velocity, Pelusio captured the string in weird curving patterns, or seemed to create semi-solid, kaleidoscopic towering objects, deformed by bits of rag she casually threw into its vortex. It seemed to embody all that Sonica is about: a harnessing of technology and the simple physics of sound and vision to beguiling artistic ends, at once playfully captivating and intellectually provocative.