It’s from a little Japanese cartoon I saw one day and thought that it was a really perfect name for a festival. If you’re passionate about this work then you need to be passionate about getting more people in Scotland and the UK to feel the same way about it – it needs to kick people up their arses a little bit and get them to come along and take a risk on something. I thought it was a fairly punk expression, which should be the point of a festival like this. To get people to stop being so meek and going to the same things or just seeing a safe French arthouse film. That’s our audience – the people who should see other things. They think they have a refined aesthetic taste in cinema. We are saying come along, and invest £9 of your money for an afternoon and I bet you there’ll be something here that’ll make you realise that you’re being a bit timid and you’re just being a little bit middle class. That was the kind of idea behind it.

The impetus for doing a festival at DCA came from their previous director, Faith Liddell, who’s a friend of mine and gave me my first ever job in the arts – working in the cloak room at the Famous Grouse House when I was nineteen or something and she was the director. Anyway, she came to Instal, the experimental music festival I organise in Glasgow, the first year that we did that, and really loved it and thought that it was doing something that wasn’t happening in Scotland. She asked me to try and put together a project with her that would happen at DCA and which basically addressed ‘sound’ but from the perspective of a visual art gallery.

I wasn’t interested in just staging installations or very long durational works that just sit there for two months. I’m much more interested in developing an audience and engaging with people through an experience, through a concentrated or a communal experience. I think that you get that at a festival as opposed to going to Sonic Boom, the exhibition at the Hayward, or by some other exhibition like that.

The festival was conceived at DCA to pick up on some of the ideas that I thought they stood for. It was to try and relate sound in someway to the visual, to look at things that were interesting to us that related sound to visual media. There were installation pieces but there was also a screening programme and the point of the performances when we started off was that they were supposed to be collaborative pieces between artist filmmakers and musicians. I think of the three years that we’ve done the festival, it’s taken us until this year to get it right. It’s taken quite a while to get the right balance. I feel maybe about only a third of the collaborations worked so far. KYTN06 was the first year that the live performances have all had something interesting to say. There have been conversations between sound and image that have been meaningful, rather than just people soundtracking a silent work. The filmmakers have actually been present and there’s been a conceptual link between sound and image that we’ve refused to shy away from. Whereas before maybe there have been pieces where the music’s been incredibly interesting but the film hasn’t really worked or there’s been no conversation between the two. This year we’ve tried very hard to make them more like performed installations where there’s a conversation between the two media or across the two media in someway. But it’s taken us a while to get that to work. I think the film programme worked last year, and worked really well this year.

Yes a similar number of events have happened. Though they didn’t start working as well conceptually , they worked really well as a live music event. Certainly for me, my knowledge of artists' film and video has grown a lot over the last four years. My background is in experimental music so that’s where my real knowledge lies. My knowledge of ‘expanded cinema’ and of artists’ film and video has really developed over that time to the point now where I feel confident with the programme that we put together as a whole.

I think there are lots of ways to define it. There’s the fact that you’re presenting stuff to a predominantly Scottish audience, and they don’t necessarily have a huge amount of access to works. So there’s an informative service that we can provide in showcasing the best archival work that meets our brief. There’s something very, very positive in that. I’m quite interested curatorially anyway in drawing out links between work from previous generations and reappraising where they sit in contemporary practice. Obviously you want to include current work because that’s what’s happening to us now; it says something about today’s experience.

If you’re passionate about this work then you’ve got a duty to try and expand or grow an audience. I feel that this type of film and this type of music offers the opportunity for the public and artists to have real emotional engagement. All those things that you talk about when you have to convince the Arts Council to give you money, you know. This work can change the way that you look at the world. In order to be really evangelical and try and grow audiences, then you have to try and offer as many points of access as you can. From a film programme’s point of view, it’s very beneficial to show archival work, to show new work, to show work that’s maybe made by people who would call themselves visual artists, but they’re working in film, or to show work by filmmakers who are working in sound. All of those different aspects mean that you don’t expect everybody to come to the festival, for three days, to love everything that they see.

You also have to try and make it dead cheap – I think the day tickets are £9 or something and an audience can come and spend one day, eight or nine hours, and see a whole bunch of stuff and hopefully half of that or a third of that they’ll come away having got something from. In trying to figure out our festival programme it’s important to think about the audience and about their way into it. In Dundee there aren’t 350 people who know all about experimental film or expanded cinema, or about European improvisation or post-idiomatic saxophone playing, there aren’t those people but there are people that can respond to it as an experience.

We were pretty conscious as well that from the first year that we didn’t want to put the older elements of the film programme in a context of the past, but to show them as just as valid and just as important as new work. Often the films only exist on 16mm and are very rare, so a lot of people won’t have seen them. That was a really key thing from my point of view, to try and get these films actually seen by an audience. So by mixing it up, you’re offering people a bit of everything rather than asking people to commit to seeing a retrospective of Oskar Fischinger’s work, for example.

It’s important to create a dynamic to an event as well to create a weekend of experience. Hopefully people come for the whole weekend, for three days. And even if they don’t then you have to think about them coming for the day, so you have to try and create a dynamic to that whereby there are pieces of different durations, there’s pieces from different periods, there’s different experiences to have. So that’s why we try and encourage people to come to the screenings in the afternoon – some of those are half-hour shorts, others are small programmes of shorts and then that moves into the evening with something like a performed installation and then into two performances. Different points of access, different ways in.

It’s not about whether it’s easy or not to programme. It’s about trying to put on the best event or a unique event that isn’t replicated anywhere else that audiences and artists can really respond to. I think you could do three days of flicker films – but who would be there on the third day? There wouldn’t be anybody there. It doesn’t matter how fantastic the works are, you could be saving Arnulf Rainer (Peter Kubelka, 16mm, Austria, 1960) right for the end but nobody would see it. I don’t think it’s about whether it’s easy or not, it’s a difficult festival to programme it’s much harder to programme than my other events. But I think it’s about trying to offer a range of experiences to people.