As festival season draws to a close, the tents are packed up for another year and the back-to-school of Virgo season starts to feel a bit too real, we reflect on some of our favourite summer moments. Houghton festival, famed for its “24 hour music” approach and little forest stages, returned to the grounds of Houghton Hall in Norfolk from 6–9 August, bringing together four days and nights of electronic music, visual art and performance across the estate which is known for its art and sculpure collection.

Founded and directed by artist and DJ Craig Richards, Houghton takes place amongst woodland, a lake and the estate’s sculpture park. This year’s visual arts programme included new commissions by Ryan Gander, Cella Collective and Mitre & Mondays, Henry Krokatsis, Nicole Gordon and Ke Peng, Call Super and Richards himself.

Returning to the festival was artist Chris Levine, whose installations Full Beam and Light is Love offered two stunning encounters with light, and created a centrepiece for revellers traversing the grounds.

Full Beam took over the main lake, centred around a surreal chrome-plated VW camper van first seen at Houghton in 2025. This year, the work took on a new continuous form, with a laser visible across the site and extending upwards into the sky. Hidden amongst the trees, Light is Love offered a more intimate experience, projecting images into the viewer’s peripheral vision.

For Levine, light is closely connected to consciousness. He has worked with lasers throughout his career, beginning with what he describes as a “love affair” with the medium after encountering his first small red laser dot as a child. “There’s something fundamentally beautiful about laser and that’s because it’s so pure,” he says. “It’s single frequencies of light and we don’t normally experience that.” Focusing on that signal can create a particular state of attention. “To put your attention onto it, to tune into it, can very quickly put you, the audience, into a meditative state. It’s a pure signal to focus on in an increasingly noisy and chaotic world.”

This shift makes Houghton an interesting context for Levine’s work. There was a time, he says, when his full-on lasers were another layer on top of everything at a festival, intended to “get you higher”. For a period, he dismissed festivals altogether, feeling there was too much noise and distraction for his work to function, but Houghton changed his mind: “Houghton has taught me that despite being in a 24-hour techno sound environment, I simply have to work it harder and up the sensory dials, so that one is awestruck and taken into the present moment, the space between thought where you are totally immersed in a sensation of beauty.”

His latest work with lasers has also pushed towards increasingly ambitious scales. While testing a laser for his installation Higher Power in Venice, the beam was spotted by the International Space Station. “It blows my mind that the artwork titled Higher Power is still propagating in space and increasing in size at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, as you read this,” he says. “Biggest is best right? Can an artwork get any bigger?!”

At Houghton, however, Levine’s focus is on something closer and more immediate: attention. In the middle of a festival shaped by music, movement and thousands of people, his work attempts to create what he calls “the space between thought”.

“It’s a meditative state,” he says, “and that’s a great place to be, wherever you are.”

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Twin took a moment to chat to Chris about his work:

Artists have always worked with invisible forces like wind, gravity, magnetism and sound, but light is unique because it’s both the fastest thing we know and the condition through which we perceive reality itself. Do you ever feel you’re making artworks with reality rather than representations of it? Where, for you, is the boundary between sculpture, perception and consciousness?

For me it’s all about consciousness, and within that mind and matter are interrelated. Nikola Tesla said to think of reality in terms of frequency and vibration, and I subscribe to that in everything I do. 

Whilst people come together to dance and explore altered states, and human experiences like joy, elation, movement and exhaustion, do you think your work creates altered states of consciousness? Is this something you hope it does?

Back in the day, I was involved in rave and used laser to create peak experience. Then I got into recovery and sought my highs in different ways. Here and now in 2026 I used laser very differently and my work is about taking my audience towards stillness…as a portal to the divine.

Can light teach us something about how we relate to each other?

Given that we are comprised of complex vibrational fields, electromagnetic, the same energy but at different octaves, different frequency ranges to visible light, relating can be an energy thing. We talk of someone giving good vibes, or the bad energy of another. To have some awareness or perspective of everything being to do with frequency and vibration might help us get along. Sounds crazy, but feels right.