Rewrite
Norfolk’s Houghton Festival has become renowned over the past decade as one of British dance music’s must-attend events. But beneath the hedonistic surface lies an equally exploratory and intellectually challenging equivalent – its arts programme.
There’s a specific kind of panic that comes with losing all your friends at Houghton. Your phone, stripped of signal, has become little more than a very expensive camera and the schedule you spent weeks meticulously constructing has already been abandoned because somebody wanted to “quickly go back to the tent”. Somewhere in the distance, bass rattles through the trees, although whether it belongs to the stage you’re actually looking for is another question entirely. After a while, though, something strange happens. You stop caring.
I’ve been attending Houghton since 2023, and for a festival populated by some of the most obsessive dance music fans on earth, remarkably few of my favourite memories have involved the artists I’d highlighted on a line-up beforehand. Launched at Norfolk’s Houghton Hall in 2017, the four-day festival is curated by longtime fabric resident Craig Richards and produced by the team behind Gottwood, who approached Richards about creating a new gathering on the estate.
From the beginning, the idea was to give art, music and the environment equal weight rather than simply dropping sculptures around a rave. This year, bouncing between Margaret Dygas, Ben UFO, Calibre, Craig Richards, Powder, DJ Masda and Shanti Celeste provided the sort of musical rabbit holes Houghton has built its reputation on, while the increasingly adventurous live programme meant you could just as easily stumble into Reggie Watts or Underground Resistance performing with Saul Williams.
Still, Houghton has always seemed to operate according to a different logic than its timetable. You head somewhere for one thing and find another; friends disappear, and strangers replace them, and an intended half-hour stop becomes three hours. By Sunday, asking somebody what they’re doing next is usually met with “just having a wander”.
The arts programme nestles in that logic. Spread across the grounds, it brings together permanent sculpture around Houghton Hall, temporary commissions, installations hidden in the woods and participatory works that you can stumble upon while you’re heading somewhere else. At Houghton, art isn’t something you step away from the festival to go and see. More often, you find it by accident.
That feeling of discovery felt particularly precious in 2026, when most of our lives have been engineered to remove uncertainty through our phones. Spotify knows what we want to hear, Google Maps has made properly losing ourselves difficult and even 30 seconds spent waiting for someone can be filled with at least five TikToks before an actual thought gets the chance to form. At Houghton, famously, the little dopamine machines barely work.
There are moments when you would quite like your phone to magically gain a phone signal, particularly when trying to locate somebody in a hundred acres of Norfolk countryside. Somewhere around the point you accept that it won’t, though, it becomes rather freeing. Houghton’s escapism has never felt solely about getting wrecked in a field, although there is certainly no shortage of opportunity to do that. Part of it comes from surrendering some control over what happens next.
Artist Henry Krokatsis has been exploiting that possibility since the festival began back in 2017. The London-born artist is known for transforming discarded and everyday materials into sculptures and installations, but the participatory performances he creates at Houghton use something less tangible. “The materials this time are the people and their expectations,” he told me.
His contribution this year was difficult to predict even by Houghton standards. Pedilavium involved around 40 people washing strangers’ feet while dressed in century-old linen smocks, which Krokatsis cheerfully told me he wanted to look “really like a cult”. Foot washing has a history stretching through religion, hospitality, humility and service, although transplanted into a festival, where the feet in question have spent several days marinating inside trainers, the associations become slightly less holy. What interested him was its non-transactional nature. “We don’t really have that in our daily lives,” he said. “It’s literally a stranger doing something that we wouldn’t even expect those closest to us to do.”
Krokatsis liked the awkwardness of it too. Take your shoes and socks off somewhere like Oxford Street, he pointed out, and you immediately change your relationship with everyone around you – most likely negatively, I assume. “You take a lot of stuff for granted, don’t you, about all the conventions; they’re all kind of locked into place. We just abide by them because it’s the societal norm.” Yet he believes breaking them can be surprisingly potent. “Whenever you feel a reticence towards something, and then you do it, that’s where any change happens.”
Crucially, nobody had travelled to Norfolk specifically to have their feet washed – not that I knew of, anyway. Krokatsis described the work as sitting in your “peripheral vision”, encountered while heading somewhere else rather than through a conscious decision to seek it out. “You’re open to them in such a completely different way than you are when you have an intentionality towards them,” he said of such encounters. “That intentionality sets you up, doesn’t it? You already expect it to be a certain way.” The alternative, he suggested, was allowing a bit more randomness in. “We don’t really factor a lot of randomness into our life,” he said. “There’s a huge value in it.”
Once you started looking at Houghton, strange things were everywhere. Conceptual artist Ryan Gander installed three enormous black balloons around the site, asking: Do you smile in your sleep?, How far is a head start?, and Is everything necessary? Nicole Gordon and Ke Peng’s Contact Field suspended rotating mirrored panels in the woods, throwing light through haze between the trees, while musician and visual artist Call Super went in another direction entirely with The Kardashians, A Third Place. An open-air living room made from trees felled on the estate, it came complete with wooden thrones and sofas facing an imaginary television on which, naturally, The Kardashians was playing.
The strangest collision between Houghton’s various worlds came on its daily sculpture tour. Around 20 of us were loaded onto the back of a vehicle that looked like it had been borrowed from a nearby farm and bumped away from the festival, the sound systems slowly receding behind us until the thud that had become almost subliminal disappeared altogether. Suddenly there was silence, immaculate parkland and Houghton Hall looming in the background, looking absurdly grand after several days of living in a tent.
British sculptor Lynn Chadwick’s metal beasts were particularly unnerving out there. Known for the angular, often creature-like bronze and steel figures that made him one of Britain’s major post-war sculptors, Chadwick’s works resembled dystopian robot dogs patiently waiting for humanity to make a wrong move. The mechanical predator from Black Mirror’s Metalhead immediately came to mind, which hopefully wasn’t a comparison made any more convincing by whatever anyone else on the sculpture tour had taken.
American Light and Space pioneer James Turrell’s Skyspace provided a considerably calmer experience; the permanent work turned the actual sky into part of the piece through an aperture in the ceiling. Sitting beneath it as the ceiling became a window into the night sky was one of those rare festival moments when everybody instinctively became quieter. It was contemplative, strangely moving and getting dangerously close to spirituality, right up until a member of staff informed us that a child had once been conceived inside it, and I became considerably more aware of the bench I was sitting on. This happened quite a lot at Houghton, where something could feel genuinely profound for five minutes before somebody said something absurd and you remembered you were at a festival.
Cella Collective and Mitre & Mondays’ Water Tower offered another place to briefly disappear. Cella is a collective whose work explores architecture, ecology and materials, while Mitre & Mondays is a London design and fabrication studio founded by Finn Thomson and Josef Shanley-Jackson. Conceived as a beacon away from the busier woodland, their 5.5-metre structure was built almost entirely from timber and water reed. “It’s basically sticks and leaves,” Shanley-Jackson told me, which is probably the most efficient description of a 5.5-metre piece of architecture I’ve heard.
Getting those sticks and leaves upright was considerably less simple. Much of the project was, as Cella’s Alys Hargreaves put it, “a labour of love on weekends and evenings”, with sections prefabricated in a borrowed barn near Huddersfield before being transported to Norfolk and assembled on site. Thatching was new territory too, with master thatcher Wayne Halfpenny brought in to teach them the ropes. “We’ve kind of each got our own little bits that we’re better at,” Cella’s Ella Caldicott said, “but then there’s also the main key feature of the build that it’s all a learning process.”
That process was allowed to remain visible. Shanley-Jackson told me he finds something immersive when he can “see the thought or the kind of approach that someone’s taken with something”, following its “junctions, joins” and getting “a little sort of peek into how someone’s thought about doing something”. Rather than immersion meaning more sensory information, here it meant concentrating on the evidence that somebody had actually made the thing in front of you.
Inside, the round structure’s four entrances and deep thatch created what Hargreaves described as a “protected and sheltered acoustic”, intimate without entirely cutting you off from the festival. Caldicott liked that contradiction: “It felt private,” she said, “but also you could see up and see the whole sky”, along with “telehandlers in the distance trying to get people out of the pond”.
That balance between retreat and connection fitted neatly into what they thought a festival could offer. Hargreaves spoke about experiencing something without “the extra fuzz or noise of being connected”, while Shanley-Jackson described Houghton as “an annual reminder of what real connection actually is”. Caldicott called a festival “a bit of a social infrastructure”, its different spaces creating “little pockets” of interaction. The Water Tower was one of them: not an escape from Houghton so much as a change in its tempo, somewhere the festival became small enough to notice who and what was immediately around you.
People seemed unusually unguarded inside too, with apparently no secrets being kept, which was excellent news for a nosy prick like me. By Sunday, I found myself sitting there while a group of Scottish lads conducted what sounded increasingly like an intervention for their friend, whose alleged crime was not having showered once since arriving at the festival. Months of research, construction and learning how to thatch had culminated in providing the perfect acoustic environment for someone to be informed that he stank.
After dark, the lake – Houghton’s picturesque centrepiece – became home to one of the festival’s most striking installations. Floating on the water was Full Beam, Chris Levine’s surreal combination of a chrome-plated vintage Volkswagen camper van and lasers firing high into the night sky. The British-Canadian artist is best known for his work with light, alongside his celebrated portrait of Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes closed, and His relationship with Houghton stretches back to his 2021 exhibition 528 Hz Love Frequency at the Hall. His eventual move into the festival itself was encouraged by Craig Richards and Levine’s son, who apparently made the strongest case: “Dad, you’ve got to do Houghton. Houghton’s my religion.”
The van itself had originally been bought to house laser equipment for Glastonbury’s 50th anniversary in 2020, before COVID killed the festival, yet Levine had already committed what he called the “sacrilegious” act of cutting a hole in the roof of the vintage split-screen camper so beams could escape. It eventually found its way to Houghton, where Richards suggested the obviously sensible next step of floating it in the middle of a lake.
At night, lasers fired upwards from it, cutting through smoke that sometimes gathered into cloud-like layers overhead. It turns out everybody at a festival loves lasers, which perhaps shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, and people kept accumulating around the lake without anyone apparently deciding to do so. I spent a long time sitting beside the water, awe-inspired and hypnotised, watching them with a couple of friends. At some point I started wondering how far the beams could actually travel and liked the idea that somewhere unimaginably distant an alien might notice one and investigate, making its first experience of human civilisation Houghton Festival. Whether a sleep-deprived, intoxicated crowd gathered around a floating Volkswagen represented the species at its best or worst remained unclear.
Aside from that thought, the whole experience was genuinely moving. Houghton involves so much movement that stopping can feel oddly dramatic, yet here hundreds of people were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder watching light hit the sky and smoke. For all the technology involved, the scene felt strangely primitive, like a group of humans had found something luminous and collectively gone, essentially, “fucking hell, look at that!”
Levine has practised meditation for 25 years – a practice he credits with finally helping him through years of mental health struggles – and described it and stillness to me as “a portal to the divine”, somewhere beyond “all the mental stuff” where the bandwidth of perception can briefly widen. A techno festival might seem an unlikely place to pursue it, but Levine saw that contradiction as part of the appeal. “You might be at a techno festival, and it’s boom, boom, boom,” he said. “But you stop, and you lose yourself in that moment when you kind of surrender to the beauty of it. You’re just not thinking; you’re just completely in the present moment.” It might only last seconds, but “that moment is a meditative space.”
Laser offered a particularly direct route there for the artist. “Lasers are a very pure form of light, single wavelengths of light. It’s a very pure signal,” Levine explained. Amid the noise, strobes and people, focusing on that signal could put you “in the space between thought”. Levine wasn’t especially interested in making art that had to be solved either. “A lot of art can be too, you know, held down by thinking you’ve got to approach it through a catalogue or through a narrative,” he said. “For me, it’s all about the feeling.” Simply put, he wanted the experience to “short-circuit the mind and get straight to the heart”.
During 528 Hz Love Frequency, he remembered anonymously wandering around his own exhibition and overhearing a child tell his mother: “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. But I love it.” Levine laughed when he told me. “For me, that’s it. You don’t have to intellectualise about it. It’s all about that childlike wonder.”
When I mentioned social media and the increasingly rare experience of being left alone with my own brain, Levine expressed that he hoped his work could offer a space away from that. “We haven’t evolved quickly enough to deal with the onslaught of information,” he said. “Those dopamine hits you talk about, it’s a relentless bombardment.” He believes art could offer its own brief refuge: “The experience is some time out from your life, and we all need that more and more.”
For Krokatsis, escaping that noise didn’t necessarily mean escaping yourself. He described dance music as having a “communal, almost spiritual” quality, something that becomes fundamentally different when experienced among hundreds of other people. “It creates something with the other,” he said. “That takes you out yourself.” Pedilavium, he argued, operated on a similar principle.
He had seen such encounters turn unexpectedly inward before. At an earlier Houghton, Krokatsis created a participatory work using Solfeggio frequencies – specific sound tones that are believed by holistic practitioners to promote mental and physical well-being through sound therapy. One attendee selected a frequency associated with the throat and communication, and Krokatsis suggested there might be someone in his life he needed to say something to. The man returned the following year and told him he had finally had a conversation with his father he had been avoiding for years. “It totally transformed my relationship with my father,” Krokatsis remembered him saying. The work, he felt, had created “a sort of cypher for that to happen”.
“There’s almost like two kinds of escapism,” Krokatsis told me. One is the version everybody already understands, where “you get totally trollied” and lose yourself to escape whatever problems you arrived with. The other was to “bypass yourself to get to the part of you that’s connected to everything”. Standing among hundreds of people being taken somewhere by the same art or music could offer a version of that. “It’s beyond you,” he said. “And it’s a version of escapism, but it’s really powerful and positive.”
That distinction stayed with me. Escapism is normally talked about as avoidance, but at Houghton the act of temporarily stepping outside ordinary life often seemed to make room for things that usually struggle to get through. A conversation with a stranger, the sky framed by a square hole in a ceiling, somebody washing your feet, a beam of light disappearing upwards. None of them demanded very much from you beyond being there and letting go.
Of course, all alternate realities and moments of escapism eventually chuck you out, and the end of a festival already ranks somewhere among life’s more unpleasant emotional experiences. Everyone looks slightly haunted, the tent that once represented possibility has become an enemy that needs stuffing into a bag, and people make solemn promises to someone they met 36 hours ago that they absolutely will see each other again. After four days of barely knowing what was happening beyond a few fields in Norfolk, the shuttle pulled away towards the station and my phone suddenly rediscovered civilisation. The notifications started coming through and, embarrassingly, there were fewer than I had imagined.
Still, watching them populate the screen made me feel slightly sick. Messages, emails and apps were suddenly asking for little pieces of my attention again, and I put off replying to most people for a few days because I genuinely couldn’t stomach immediately slipping back into it. Now, being permanently reachable felt almost aggressive.
Naturally, this enlightenment lasted approximately no time at all. A few days passed, routine returned and so did a screen-time figure I would prefer not to publish. I didn’t come back from Houghton transformed into somebody who meditates at sunrise and keeps their phone in a locked drawer at night – I’m still perfectly capable of scrolling while watching TV without taking either of them in. But I did notice the return to normal in a way I hadn’t before.
The art hadn’t been a distraction from the festival, or something worthy I’d done between sets. It had changed the texture of being there. Turrell made a patch of sky feel worth sitting beneath. A Water Tower turned shelter into somewhere strangers actually spoke to one another. Krokatsis made something as mundane and slightly revolting as a dirty foot unexpectedly intimate. Levine persuaded hundreds of people at a techno festival to sit still and look up.
Maybe that is what Houghton’s art programme does best. It doesn’t ask you to leave the escapism behind and become terribly serious about culture for an hour. It works inside the same loosened state the festival creates, when your plans have become negotiable and you’re a little more susceptible to whatever happens to catch you.
Four days of that wasn’t enough to rewire my relationship with my phone, obviously. But in a world increasingly adept at deciding what deserves our attention before we’ve had the chance to choose for ourselves, there was something valuable in remembering how it feels for that attention to be genuinely captured. Sometimes getting distracted is the whole point, I guess.
Words – Chris Saunders
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Norfolk’s Houghton Festival has become renowned over the past decade as one of British dance music’s must-attend events. But beneath the hedonistic surface lies an equally exploratory and intellectually challenging equivalent – its arts programme.
There’s a specific kind of panic that comes with losing all your friends at Houghton. Your phone, stripped of signal, has become little more than a very expensive camera and the schedule you spent weeks meticulously constructing has already been abandoned because somebody wanted to “quickly go back to the tent”. Somewhere in the distance, bass rattles through the trees, although whether it belongs to the stage you’re actually looking for is another question entirely. After a while, though, something strange happens. You stop caring.
I’ve been attending Houghton since 2023, and for a festival populated by some of the most obsessive dance music fans on earth, remarkably few of my favourite memories have involved the artists I’d highlighted on a line-up beforehand. Launched at Norfolk’s Houghton Hall in 2017, the four-day festival is curated by longtime fabric resident Craig Richards and produced by the team behind Gottwood, who approached Richards about creating a new gathering on the estate.
From the beginning, the idea was to give art, music and the environment equal weight rather than simply dropping sculptures around a rave. This year, bouncing between Margaret Dygas, Ben UFO, Calibre, Craig Richards, Powder, DJ Masda and Shanti Celeste provided the sort of musical rabbit holes Houghton has built its reputation on, while the increasingly adventurous live programme meant you could just as easily stumble into Reggie Watts or Underground Resistance performing with Saul Williams.
Still, Houghton has always seemed to operate according to a different logic than its timetable. You head somewhere for one thing and find another; friends disappear, and strangers replace them, and an intended half-hour stop becomes three hours. By Sunday, asking somebody what they’re doing next is usually met with “just having a wander”.
The arts programme nestles in that logic. Spread across the grounds, it brings together permanent sculpture around Houghton Hall, temporary commissions, installations hidden in the woods and participatory works that you can stumble upon while you’re heading somewhere else. At Houghton, art isn’t something you step away from the festival to go and see. More often, you find it by accident.
That feeling of discovery felt particularly precious in 2026, when most of our lives have been engineered to remove uncertainty through our phones. Spotify knows what we want to hear, Google Maps has made properly losing ourselves difficult and even 30 seconds spent waiting for someone can be filled with at least five TikToks before an actual thought gets the chance to form. At Houghton, famously, the little dopamine machines barely work.
There are moments when you would quite like your phone to magically gain a phone signal, particularly when trying to locate somebody in a hundred acres of Norfolk countryside. Somewhere around the point you accept that it won’t, though, it becomes rather freeing. Houghton’s escapism has never felt solely about getting wrecked in a field, although there is certainly no shortage of opportunity to do that. Part of it comes from surrendering some control over what happens next.
Artist Henry Krokatsis has been exploiting that possibility since the festival began back in 2017. The London-born artist is known for transforming discarded and everyday materials into sculptures and installations, but the participatory performances he creates at Houghton use something less tangible. “The materials this time are the people and their expectations,” he told me.
His contribution this year was difficult to predict even by Houghton standards. Pedilavium involved around 40 people washing strangers’ feet while dressed in century-old linen smocks, which Krokatsis cheerfully told me he wanted to look “really like a cult”. Foot washing has a history stretching through religion, hospitality, humility and service, although transplanted into a festival, where the feet in question have spent several days marinating inside trainers, the associations become slightly less holy. What interested him was its non-transactional nature. “We don’t really have that in our daily lives,” he said. “It’s literally a stranger doing something that we wouldn’t even expect those closest to us to do.”
Krokatsis liked the awkwardness of it too. Take your shoes and socks off somewhere like Oxford Street, he pointed out, and you immediately change your relationship with everyone around you – most likely negatively, I assume. “You take a lot of stuff for granted, don’t you, about all the conventions; they’re all kind of locked into place. We just abide by them because it’s the societal norm.” Yet he believes breaking them can be surprisingly potent. “Whenever you feel a reticence towards something, and then you do it, that’s where any change happens.”
Crucially, nobody had travelled to Norfolk specifically to have their feet washed – not that I knew of, anyway. Krokatsis described the work as sitting in your “peripheral vision”, encountered while heading somewhere else rather than through a conscious decision to seek it out. “You’re open to them in such a completely different way than you are when you have an intentionality towards them,” he said of such encounters. “That intentionality sets you up, doesn’t it? You already expect it to be a certain way.” The alternative, he suggested, was allowing a bit more randomness in. “We don’t really factor a lot of randomness into our life,” he said. “There’s a huge value in it.”
Once you started looking at Houghton, strange things were everywhere. Conceptual artist Ryan Gander installed three enormous black balloons around the site, asking: Do you smile in your sleep?, How far is a head start?, and Is everything necessary? Nicole Gordon and Ke Peng’s Contact Field suspended rotating mirrored panels in the woods, throwing light through haze between the trees, while musician and visual artist Call Super went in another direction entirely with The Kardashians, A Third Place. An open-air living room made from trees felled on the estate, it came complete with wooden thrones and sofas facing an imaginary television on which, naturally, The Kardashians was playing.
The strangest collision between Houghton’s various worlds came on its daily sculpture tour. Around 20 of us were loaded onto the back of a vehicle that looked like it had been borrowed from a nearby farm and bumped away from the festival, the sound systems slowly receding behind us until the thud that had become almost subliminal disappeared altogether. Suddenly there was silence, immaculate parkland and Houghton Hall looming in the background, looking absurdly grand after several days of living in a tent.
British sculptor Lynn Chadwick’s metal beasts were particularly unnerving out there. Known for the angular, often creature-like bronze and steel figures that made him one of Britain’s major post-war sculptors, Chadwick’s works resembled dystopian robot dogs patiently waiting for humanity to make a wrong move. The mechanical predator from Black Mirror’s Metalhead immediately came to mind, which hopefully wasn’t a comparison made any more convincing by whatever anyone else on the sculpture tour had taken.
American Light and Space pioneer James Turrell’s Skyspace provided a considerably calmer experience; the permanent work turned the actual sky into part of the piece through an aperture in the ceiling. Sitting beneath it as the ceiling became a window into the night sky was one of those rare festival moments when everybody instinctively became quieter. It was contemplative, strangely moving and getting dangerously close to spirituality, right up until a member of staff informed us that a child had once been conceived inside it, and I became considerably more aware of the bench I was sitting on. This happened quite a lot at Houghton, where something could feel genuinely profound for five minutes before somebody said something absurd and you remembered you were at a festival.
Cella Collective and Mitre & Mondays’ Water Tower offered another place to briefly disappear. Cella is a collective whose work explores architecture, ecology and materials, while Mitre & Mondays is a London design and fabrication studio founded by Finn Thomson and Josef Shanley-Jackson. Conceived as a beacon away from the busier woodland, their 5.5-metre structure was built almost entirely from timber and water reed. “It’s basically sticks and leaves,” Shanley-Jackson told me, which is probably the most efficient description of a 5.5-metre piece of architecture I’ve heard.
Getting those sticks and leaves upright was considerably less simple. Much of the project was, as Cella’s Alys Hargreaves put it, “a labour of love on weekends and evenings”, with sections prefabricated in a borrowed barn near Huddersfield before being transported to Norfolk and assembled on site. Thatching was new territory too, with master thatcher Wayne Halfpenny brought in to teach them the ropes. “We’ve kind of each got our own little bits that we’re better at,” Cella’s Ella Caldicott said, “but then there’s also the main key feature of the build that it’s all a learning process.”
That process was allowed to remain visible. Shanley-Jackson told me he finds something immersive when he can “see the thought or the kind of approach that someone’s taken with something”, following its “junctions, joins” and getting “a little sort of peek into how someone’s thought about doing something”. Rather than immersion meaning more sensory information, here it meant concentrating on the evidence that somebody had actually made the thing in front of you.
Inside, the round structure’s four entrances and deep thatch created what Hargreaves described as a “protected and sheltered acoustic”, intimate without entirely cutting you off from the festival. Caldicott liked that contradiction: “It felt private,” she said, “but also you could see up and see the whole sky”, along with “telehandlers in the distance trying to get people out of the pond”.
That balance between retreat and connection fitted neatly into what they thought a festival could offer. Hargreaves spoke about experiencing something without “the extra fuzz or noise of being connected”, while Shanley-Jackson described Houghton as “an annual reminder of what real connection actually is”. Caldicott called a festival “a bit of a social infrastructure”, its different spaces creating “little pockets” of interaction. The Water Tower was one of them: not an escape from Houghton so much as a change in its tempo, somewhere the festival became small enough to notice who and what was immediately around you.
People seemed unusually unguarded inside too, with apparently no secrets being kept, which was excellent news for a nosy prick like me. By Sunday, I found myself sitting there while a group of Scottish lads conducted what sounded increasingly like an intervention for their friend, whose alleged crime was not having showered once since arriving at the festival. Months of research, construction and learning how to thatch had culminated in providing the perfect acoustic environment for someone to be informed that he stank.
After dark, the lake – Houghton’s picturesque centrepiece – became home to one of the festival’s most striking installations. Floating on the water was Full Beam, Chris Levine’s surreal combination of a chrome-plated vintage Volkswagen camper van and lasers firing high into the night sky. The British-Canadian artist is best known for his work with light, alongside his celebrated portrait of Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes closed, and His relationship with Houghton stretches back to his 2021 exhibition 528 Hz Love Frequency at the Hall. His eventual move into the festival itself was encouraged by Craig Richards and Levine’s son, who apparently made the strongest case: “Dad, you’ve got to do Houghton. Houghton’s my religion.”
The van itself had originally been bought to house laser equipment for Glastonbury’s 50th anniversary in 2020, before COVID killed the festival, yet Levine had already committed what he called the “sacrilegious” act of cutting a hole in the roof of the vintage split-screen camper so beams could escape. It eventually found its way to Houghton, where Richards suggested the obviously sensible next step of floating it in the middle of a lake.
At night, lasers fired upwards from it, cutting through smoke that sometimes gathered into cloud-like layers overhead. It turns out everybody at a festival loves lasers, which perhaps shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, and people kept accumulating around the lake without anyone apparently deciding to do so. I spent a long time sitting beside the water, awe-inspired and hypnotised, watching them with a couple of friends. At some point I started wondering how far the beams could actually travel and liked the idea that somewhere unimaginably distant an alien might notice one and investigate, making its first experience of human civilisation Houghton Festival. Whether a sleep-deprived, intoxicated crowd gathered around a floating Volkswagen represented the species at its best or worst remained unclear.
Aside from that thought, the whole experience was genuinely moving. Houghton involves so much movement that stopping can feel oddly dramatic, yet here hundreds of people were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder watching light hit the sky and smoke. For all the technology involved, the scene felt strangely primitive, like a group of humans had found something luminous and collectively gone, essentially, “fucking hell, look at that!”
Levine has practised meditation for 25 years – a practice he credits with finally helping him through years of mental health struggles – and described it and stillness to me as “a portal to the divine”, somewhere beyond “all the mental stuff” where the bandwidth of perception can briefly widen. A techno festival might seem an unlikely place to pursue it, but Levine saw that contradiction as part of the appeal. “You might be at a techno festival, and it’s boom, boom, boom,” he said. “But you stop, and you lose yourself in that moment when you kind of surrender to the beauty of it. You’re just not thinking; you’re just completely in the present moment.” It might only last seconds, but “that moment is a meditative space.”
Laser offered a particularly direct route there for the artist. “Lasers are a very pure form of light, single wavelengths of light. It’s a very pure signal,” Levine explained. Amid the noise, strobes and people, focusing on that signal could put you “in the space between thought”. Levine wasn’t especially interested in making art that had to be solved either. “A lot of art can be too, you know, held down by thinking you’ve got to approach it through a catalogue or through a narrative,” he said. “For me, it’s all about the feeling.” Simply put, he wanted the experience to “short-circuit the mind and get straight to the heart”.
During 528 Hz Love Frequency, he remembered anonymously wandering around his own exhibition and overhearing a child tell his mother: “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. But I love it.” Levine laughed when he told me. “For me, that’s it. You don’t have to intellectualise about it. It’s all about that childlike wonder.”
When I mentioned social media and the increasingly rare experience of being left alone with my own brain, Levine expressed that he hoped his work could offer a space away from that. “We haven’t evolved quickly enough to deal with the onslaught of information,” he said. “Those dopamine hits you talk about, it’s a relentless bombardment.” He believes art could offer its own brief refuge: “The experience is some time out from your life, and we all need that more and more.”
For Krokatsis, escaping that noise didn’t necessarily mean escaping yourself. He described dance music as having a “communal, almost spiritual” quality, something that becomes fundamentally different when experienced among hundreds of other people. “It creates something with the other,” he said. “That takes you out yourself.” Pedilavium, he argued, operated on a similar principle.
He had seen such encounters turn unexpectedly inward before. At an earlier Houghton, Krokatsis created a participatory work using Solfeggio frequencies – specific sound tones that are believed by holistic practitioners to promote mental and physical well-being through sound therapy. One attendee selected a frequency associated with the throat and communication, and Krokatsis suggested there might be someone in his life he needed to say something to. The man returned the following year and told him he had finally had a conversation with his father he had been avoiding for years. “It totally transformed my relationship with my father,” Krokatsis remembered him saying. The work, he felt, had created “a sort of cypher for that to happen”.
“There’s almost like two kinds of escapism,” Krokatsis told me. One is the version everybody already understands, where “you get totally trollied” and lose yourself to escape whatever problems you arrived with. The other was to “bypass yourself to get to the part of you that’s connected to everything”. Standing among hundreds of people being taken somewhere by the same art or music could offer a version of that. “It’s beyond you,” he said. “And it’s a version of escapism, but it’s really powerful and positive.”
That distinction stayed with me. Escapism is normally talked about as avoidance, but at Houghton the act of temporarily stepping outside ordinary life often seemed to make room for things that usually struggle to get through. A conversation with a stranger, the sky framed by a square hole in a ceiling, somebody washing your feet, a beam of light disappearing upwards. None of them demanded very much from you beyond being there and letting go.
Of course, all alternate realities and moments of escapism eventually chuck you out, and the end of a festival already ranks somewhere among life’s more unpleasant emotional experiences. Everyone looks slightly haunted, the tent that once represented possibility has become an enemy that needs stuffing into a bag, and people make solemn promises to someone they met 36 hours ago that they absolutely will see each other again. After four days of barely knowing what was happening beyond a few fields in Norfolk, the shuttle pulled away towards the station and my phone suddenly rediscovered civilisation. The notifications started coming through and, embarrassingly, there were fewer than I had imagined.
Still, watching them populate the screen made me feel slightly sick. Messages, emails and apps were suddenly asking for little pieces of my attention again, and I put off replying to most people for a few days because I genuinely couldn’t stomach immediately slipping back into it. Now, being permanently reachable felt almost aggressive.
Naturally, this enlightenment lasted approximately no time at all. A few days passed, routine returned and so did a screen-time figure I would prefer not to publish. I didn’t come back from Houghton transformed into somebody who meditates at sunrise and keeps their phone in a locked drawer at night – I’m still perfectly capable of scrolling while watching TV without taking either of them in. But I did notice the return to normal in a way I hadn’t before.
The art hadn’t been a distraction from the festival, or something worthy I’d done between sets. It had changed the texture of being there. Turrell made a patch of sky feel worth sitting beneath. A Water Tower turned shelter into somewhere strangers actually spoke to one another. Krokatsis made something as mundane and slightly revolting as a dirty foot unexpectedly intimate. Levine persuaded hundreds of people at a techno festival to sit still and look up.
Maybe that is what Houghton’s art programme does best. It doesn’t ask you to leave the escapism behind and become terribly serious about culture for an hour. It works inside the same loosened state the festival creates, when your plans have become negotiable and you’re a little more susceptible to whatever happens to catch you.
Four days of that wasn’t enough to rewire my relationship with my phone, obviously. But in a world increasingly adept at deciding what deserves our attention before we’ve had the chance to choose for ourselves, there was something valuable in remembering how it feels for that attention to be genuinely captured. Sometimes getting distracted is the whole point, I guess.
Words – Chris Saunders
and integrate them seamlessly into the new content without adding new tags. Ensure the new content is fashion-related, written entirely in Japanese, and approximately 1500 words. Conclude with a “結論” section and a well-formatted “よくある質問” section. Avoid including an introduction or a note explaining the process.
