The A/V Festival is a multi-centre digital arts festival based in Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough that has steadily been going from strength to strength. The latest extravaganza boasted contributions from artists as diverse as Charlmagne Palestine, Vick Bennet and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (who reprised their Silent Sound installation, in which the artists transmitted subliminal messages to the audience from a cabinet modelled on the spirit cabinet of 19th century mediums The Davenports). The pair's incantations were infra sonically woven into a soundtrack provided by Jason Spaceman.

Nowhere was the curatorial attitude towards experiment and license given better expression than it was on the closing night event, English Journey – organised by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore and loosely inspired by JB Priestley's 1933 travelogue. These two writers and friends, whose practice increasingly exceeds the disciplines with which they are most commonly associated, brought together their own readings with contributions from poets and performances from sonic experimentalists FM Einheit of Einsturzende Neubauten and Stephen O'Malley of Sunn 0))).

Einheit's contribution – the scattering of stones and destruction of breeze blocks over mic-ed up sheet metal – invoked the industrial heritage of the Tyne riverside as much as it did his own industrial heritage, and Neubauten's mythical attempt to tunnel through the ICA stage was invoked by at least one wag at the interval. Meanwhile, a film collage had the final scene from Get Carter cut into and superimposed over a Viking sea-burial. Sinclair's piece was a personal prose-poetic invocation of his own relationship with the city's recent past, and Moore's a surreal art history that brought Turner's Snowstorm, Hannibal and his army crossing The Alps and John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, together in a narrative based around Newcastle's Laing Gallery. Spine-tingling.

Text by Mark Blacklock