"A white square bounded by loudspeakers encourages visitors to step between them and be surrounded by the music."

Visitors to the 2009 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival will be able to literally step inside a work by HCMF Composer in Residence Jonathan Harvey, when it forms part of an installation by Brussels-based video artists Visual Kitchen.

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco is a tape piece created by Harvey in 1980, during a period when he was invited to work at IRCAM, the Parisian electroacoustic research institute. The eight-channel music is composed of two digitally manipulated sound sources: Harvey's son, who was a chorister at Winchester Cathedral, and the cathedral's largest bell.

Visual Kitchen's video accompaniment features a floor projection on a white square bounded by the loudspeakers, encouraging visitors to step between them and be surrounded by the music.

"It's the whole question of how people relate to a space that's only created by sound," says Sam Vanoverschelde, who founded Visual Kitchen with Jurgen Van Gemert in the late 1990s. "The most important thing was to figure out how we were going to do an eight-point installation with the sound coming from all angles, when we only had one video. It was the contrast between spatialised sound and having a flat surface with no depth."

Vanoverschelde and Van Gemert started out as part of a VJ collective in nightclubs, moving on to create music videos and audiovisual performances. An artist-in-residency post at Bruges' Concertgebouw in 2003 marked the start of a continuing engagement with contemporary music that includes interpretations of Stockhausen, collaborations with fellow Brussels sound artist Eavesdropper and video for a new 2009 production of Karel Goeyvaerts' opera Aquarius.

Premiering in St Catherine's Church, Vilnius in October 2008 as part of the city's annual Gaida festival, the finished video mixes together eight visual tracks. Its hypnotic, shifting imagery, including stars, radiating lines and a close-up of the iris of Vanoverschelde's young daughter, lures people to the spot where the music will be most striking. "It creates an atmosphere that draws people's attention to the middle of the cube," Vanoverschelde says.

He found that some visitors appeared nervous about stepping onto the projection, due to either the disconcerting illusion of depth created by some of the imagery, or inhibitions about standing on a work of art. "In Vilnius we learned that maybe we should give people something, such as the plastic shoes you get in hospitals, so that it give people the permission to stand on it," he notes.

Anyone bold enough to enter the installation unwittingly becomes part of it: "During daytime it's more something intriguing that people stand around before going onto the video. At night it's something to be submerged in. Since the projection is from above, people have light falling upon them. Sometimes it has little flecks like stars and sometimes the shapes alter people. If you look at it from afar and see people in the beam of light, it's like a divine light falling down."

Jonathan Harvey – Visual Kitchen

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco

Electronic music (1980) by Jonathan Harvey, realised at the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination
Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM), Paris, Distributed by Faber Music Ltd., London

Video installation (2008) by Visual Kitchen (Sam Vanoverschelde & Jurgen Van Gemert)
Concept: Lieven Bertels - Production: The Holland Festival, Amsterdam

World première of the installation: Gaida Festival, Vilnius (Lithuania), 25.X.2008
Commissioned by Gaida Festival in the framework of the ISCM World Music Days 2008

Book tickets now for events featuring the work of Jonathan Harvey. Online prices from £9.

See the Mortuos Plango installation in Vilnius here .

Visit Visual Kitchen's myspace and Vimeo page for lots more content.

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