Meshwork
Meshwork is a festival dedicated to visual music as an evolving field of artistic practice. Presented in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the festival brings together artists working across new media, cinema, animation, and live performance to explore the dynamic relationships between sound, image, movement, computation, and space.
The festival takes its name from the relational notions of the meshwork, as an interwoven field of trajectories rather than a collection of discrete points. Visual music has never belonged to a single discipline or medium. It continually emerges through encounters among artists, technologies, bodies, and ideas, shaped by experimentation and exchange across generations. Meshwork embraces this condition—not as a staid genre with fixed boundaries, but as a web of interrelated practices in perpetual flux.
Drawing upon histories of audiovisual performance, Expanded Cinema, intermedia arts, and experimental animation, the festival situates contemporary works within a broader continuum of artistic inquiry while foregrounding new forms that challenge inherited distinctions between music, moving image, performance, installation, and computation. Meshwork understands these histories not as a canon to preserve, but as material to be reactivated through the inquiries, uncertainties, and urgencies of the present.
Across performances, screenings, installations, and conversations, Meshwork creates a space where artists and audiences encounter visual music as a mode of research, perception, and collective experience. The festival supports works that traverse disciplinary boundaries, cultivate unexpected collaborations, and expand the possibilities of audiovisual expression.
Founded and directed by Johannes DeYoung and Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, with support from Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts, Meshwork highlights Pittsburgh as a site for critical dialogue and artistic experimentation, bringing together local and international communities to shape the future of visual music.
Meshwork People
Johannes DeYoung
Founder & Co-Director
Johannes DeYoung is an internationally recognized artist whose practice explores animism at the intersection of computational and material processes. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and Dossier Journal. DeYoung is Associate Professor of Electronic and Time-Based Media at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously taught at Yale University School of Art, where he served as Senior Critic and founding Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and at the Yale School of Drama as a Lecturer in Design.
Annie Hui-Hsin HSieh
Founder & Co-Director
Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh is a Taiwanese-Australian composer whose work spans acoustic and electroacoustic music, exploring sound as a visceral, spatial, and social experience. Her compositions have been presented internationally at major festivals and venues, including MATA Festival, Wien Modern, Lucerne Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the National Gallery of Victoria. Her work has been commissioned and performed by leading ensembles and orchestras across Australia, Europe, Asia, and North America. Hsieh is a recipient of the APRA Art Music Fund, Dorian Le Gallienne Composition Award, and Belegura Composer Award. She is Associate Professor of Electronic Music and Composition at Carnegie Mellon University.
Coming Soon
Production Manager
Production Manager bio coming soon.
