In its fifth year, Lovebytes has established a reputation for the promotion of work by emergent artists and producers producing within the zeitgeist of art and electronic media. The resulting festivals are an eclectic mix of pieces and dialogue from practitioners and promoters looking at current areas of practice and debate. One of the most important features of the festival is its policy of promoting a fusion of popular culture and aesthetics - particularly appropriate given its location in Sheffield with its rich history of multimedia and electronic music.

This year, as part of Photo 98, Lovebytes has commissioned six new public art projects on the theme of HyperTribes. The works included in this project combine a powerful mix of international profile with attention to local issues and siting of the work. Taking the theme of the project, all the works address the notion of a collective whether that is in relation to new communities on the web or more traditional groupings such as football fanclubs or stamp collectors. Perhaps the most overtly attentive to the Sheffield community is Mike Lawson-Smith's Vanishing Points of View whose work with supporters clubs of Sheffield's football teams examines the fans who are often seen as a collective whole rather than as individuals. By projecting their images as stills and quicktime video on a large screen in the city, the fans are given the larger than life celebrity status which is usually only afforded to the players in the team. In Provincially Provisionally, Andrew Stones takes a more generic view of the changing face of bureaucracy in local government through shifts in policy and information technology. His texts in neon sited on the city Town Hall's Brutalist architecture promote a complex tension between the civic policies of former years and today's promotion of the local community and refurbishment of city facilities.

Lulu Quinn's Flocked and Simon Poulter's Hyperphilately combine research into Sheffield's sheep fields and the history of stamp collecting respectively with an approach to these phenomena from the perspective of new technologies. Flocked, as an interactive installation, irreverently makes comparison with the former existence of Meadowhall as farm land with the herding of customers in large-scale shopping malls (the current use of the Meadowhall site). Hyperphilately, by contrast, looks at national identity as represented through stamps and aims to describe how the notion of the stamp may be represented in hypermedia. Located at the city's main Post Office, Poulter implicitly poses the question of the future of the stamp in the electronic age.

The remaining works in the HyperTribes public art programme have a strong participatory element in relation to the audience. Stone Troupers by Jonathan Allen and Steve Hawley relies on the passer by to allow their image to be projected on stone gargoyles which are part of the architecture of Devonshire Street. People are encouraged to have their image grabbed in order for them to join a collection of other people's images to be projected. The projections form a community of 'virtual flaneurs' who survey the scene on this busy night-time street in the city. Remote Systems by the artists' group Premium Leisure is a moving sound based piece at Ponds Forge Leisure Centre. Using sensor beams, the users and visitors to the centre will trigger off particular sound sequences within designated areas of the space. The sound is algorithmically generated and explores the possibilities of midi as a conceptual framework. This piece is firmly grounded within techno culture but its more generic concept lies in the investigation into the representation of space through sound and midi. Sound changes in the same way that light changes in the environment and at any one time people will be subjected to a different set of projections. This piece highlights the diverse possibilities for sound within interactive media and installations, which up until relatively recently have largely been left unexplored.

With this issue in mind, one component of the Lovebytes Festival at the end of the HyperTribes public art exhibition, examines the potential for sound within multimedia and interactive environments. Interactive installations by Rolf Gehlhaar and AudioRom will investigate the different ways in which users can negotiate with sound in space. The demonstrations of packages such as KOAN and MAX along with specific projects by Greyworld, Premium Leisure and AudioRom will show the diversity of approach that can be taken to authorship of sound in multimedia. This strand of the festival also links in with the concurrent Test 1 electronic music festival.

A corporate presence within the field of electronic media is an increasingly dominating one which is having an impact on the type of work produced by artists in this area. The festival addresses these issues with a panel discussion representing a wide range of values from those people who have embraced corporate culture, through to artists who are concerned with the politics of the Millennium Dome, and to activists who are hacking into corporate sites or using commercial tactics to create interventions on the net. The Cybercircus run by irational will address the different ways in which artists have approached these interventions and subversions of commercial culture.

The film programmes represent a whole complement to the issues raised within the artworks and festival demonstrations. Bannedwagon raises questions about why bands make pop videos which are obviously not going to get through the censors. This year there is also a strong presence of videomakers who are looking at bringing together their practise with scientific theory in its broadest sense - the work of Paul Bush, Nigel Maudesley, Joshua Mosley and Jeremy Welsh seem particularly to be looking at these ideas whilst still locating their content and form in the background of their medium. One of the important policies around the Lovebytes Festival is the openness to new ideas, emergent artists and an eclectic mix. This year's event seems to highlight some of the most current issues in electronic arts and with active input from participants and delegates the debate is set to be lively.

Helen Sloan 1998