What happens when everyone in the city is listening to the same song?
Wearing headphones, you begin to travel across the city, the soundtrack in your ears turning the world around into your personal cinema. Suddenly a stranger stops you and puts a hand on your shoulder. Their lips don’t move but in your ears you can somehow hear their voice. It feels like telepathy as they begin to speak the words to the song that’s playing in their head…
You continue to move across the city, sometimes guided, sometimes alone; as events unfold in front of you it becomes harder to tell which are staged and which are real.
Built using ‘mscape’, the audience were given handheld computers with headphones. The music score they heard was controlled by satellite positioning and changed to reflect the physical location of the audience. Some performers carried battery powered wifi beacons in their pockets. When they were near an audience member the device carried by the audience would play a recording of that performers voice, the effect was like being able to hear a persons thoughts. Another group of performers were a ’subtlemob’, who roamed the streets following instructions given to them on an MP3 player, they performed everyday actions around the audience, creating a sense of deja-vu as you saw similar events occuring all around you.
SOUNDTRACK BY DUNCAN SPEAKMAN SARAH ANDERSON SAM HALMARAK
DEVISED AND PERFORMED WITH TOM WAINRIGHT MARTHA KING SYLVIA RIMAT ALEX BRADLEY EMMA BUSH SITA CALVERT-ENNALS
On the 27th September 2007, I left Nether Stowey and walked towards Bristol, arriving on the 30th September 2007. My route traced journeys made by contemporary migrant workers and while travelling I made audio recordings of the changing sound environment. On my return to Bristol I immediately performed a live remix of these recordings while speaking texts composed en route.
Text from the performance of ‘for every step you take i take a thousand’ (at ‘Port City’) presented in this small folded bookwork. This is a single edition work with a hand drawn map.
An unlimited edition of this book (with folding instructions and associated audio from the performance) is available for download at http://project.arnolfini.org.uk
[image was posted from location of capture using flickr]
Posted: August 17th, 2008
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collaboration with Birgit Binder for Fierce Festival.
Peace and quiet can be difficult to come by in the city, so wouldn’t it be useful if we had a version of Siân Lloyd who could say when the cars are going to start beeping outside your window or the neighbours are going to turn their radio up as if it was predictable as weather fronts?
Based on research involving interviews with local residents, ambient sound recordings and the measurement of environmental sound levels, NoiseForecast is an online audio show created daily over the course of Fierce festival which aims to help you find the ideal time and location to experience either a few moments of tranquility or to immerse yourself in the aural rush of urban activity.
A walk from Bridgwater train station to The Engine Room, speaking apologies to out-of-business shops that i never used while i lived there, my voice transmitted live from mobile phone to amplified phone in venue, a pre-recorded musical score played alongside.
“what happens when your ears are full of the city, and you can’t hear the sounds you make..”
‘sounds from above the ground’ was commissioned by Arnolfini as part of Breathing Space.
The walk mixes text, performance and live sound to create a site-responsive work that explore the relationship between sound and memory.
With a small group you follow a lone walker through the city streets, his internal monologue transmitted to your headphones. As you walk, listening to him dig into collective memory, the noise of the city is remixed live around you into glistening fragments and new layers.
In the performance the audience are given stereo wireless receivers and follow me through the city streets. I have a microphone on my chest and my backpack contains a laptop computer and stereo UHF audio transmitter. As we walk the audience listens through my ears as I speak memories and place marks in the city, while the laptop processes and remixes the surrounding ambience.
While aboard the MS Stubnitz as it passed through international waters between Rotterdam and Newcastle, Duncan Speakman and Sneha Solanki created an independent state whose borders were mapped on aural terrain, the hertzian spaces created by mobile phone transmissions, radio waves and acoustic sound.
When audience members applied for a passport, we recorded the invisible transmissions and electromagnetc fields around them. In a realtime performance these were processed and mixed with field recordings from the ship. The resulting soundscape were stored individually as one-off magnetic tapes that can be owned, traded, given away or destroyed by the audience, creating an individual unique audio passport for each new citizen, and encouraged a micro-climate of exchange and communication.
click below to hear an extract from one of the passports -
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“An abundance of intellect and sharp performance style, trauma made manifest in the hammering of a racing heart”The Guardian
“Uninvited Guests deliver their most intense excavation of that melancholy zone where extreme, often deeply personal experience meets the detritus of the pop-cultural information age”The Stage
Schlock collides the real with the really fake. Personal experiences of bodily trauma and the fear of accidents or violent attacks encounter the erotics of TV hospital dramas and horror-flicks. The result is a darkly comic and disconcerting mix of poignant confession and B-movie melodrama, real acts of violence and pints of fake blood.
The performers speak directly to the audience through a clear Perspex screen. It’s as if they possess a kind of second-sight as they retell others’ accidents and injuries as though they happened, or will happen, to them, or to you. The show explores the performers as acoustic instruments, using contact mics to live-sample noises from their bodies and soundtrack the show. Custom-built software enables us to process each others’ voices with pressure sensors, to increase our sampled heart-beats to impossible rates and trigger plundered samples through body contact.
Posted: March 3rd, 2005
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Live Chat explored possible relationships between real and virtual social spaces, in which people chat, exchange ideas and flirt, where cyberspace overflows into the everyday.
In the ‘live’ context of the Arnolfini, dialogue from a chatroom was spoken face-to-face by performers. Using an adhoc wireless network the performance was video streamed across Bristol harbour to the Watershed and displayed on this website. Audience members could cross the bridge in the harbour and go to the Watershed’s Digital Cafe where they could join in the online chat while remotely viewing the performers.
[PERFORMERS - Richard Dufty + Jessica Hoffmann] [This project would not have been possible without Dani Landau. This project was my first collaboration with Uninvited Guests, this working partnership continued with 'Schlock' in 2004 and 'Aftermath' in 2006 ]
Posted: December 7th, 2002
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