Duncan Speakman
As this R+D grant application is for a new form of work that does not exist yet I am submitting this short portfolio of six works created between 2011 - 2018 that I feel demonstrate key elements of my practice.
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Only Expansion
2018
Awards
BFI London Film Festival Best Interactive/XR 2021
IDFA Special Jury Award for Immersive Non-Fiction 2019
“Arresting, poised, beautiful, dark, innovative” - Seth Honor, Kaleider
As sea levels rise and wildfires burn, Only Expansion remixes the sound of the city around you to experience sonically how your own life might change in the future. A beautifully made guidebook prompts you to explore the city, choosing your own route, while headphones with customised electronics capture and manipulate the sounds around you. Field recordings of climate collapse blend into your surroundings, you begin to hear possible futures of your own city. A visceral and poetic reflection on what it means to live on a planet in crisis, Only Expansion connects the here to the elsewhere, letting you experience our tangled ecology through sound.
Only Expansion was designed to create a tangible and visceral experience of future climate collapse and ecological entanglement for participants. The printed guidebook prompts them to explore an urban environment in different ways (e.g. finding a vantage point, finding something older than them). The audio system delivers a mixture of pre-recorded sound while simultaneously processing the ambient environment using microphones attached to the outside of the headphones. So while the participant might for example hear field recordings of rising sea-levels in Louisiana, the sound of the cars and people around them are manipulated to simulate what their own city might sound like once it is flooded.
“A transporting, time-shifting, epic, unsettling and moving walk..” Kate Yedigaroff, Director, MAYK Mayfest
Only Expansion was developed with support from Theatre in The Mill Bradford, University of Exeter Arts And Culture, Lydgalleriet Bergen,, and Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants
It Must Have Been Dark By Then
2017
Awards
Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling, Columbia University, 2018
Jury Selection, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2017
“Ideas about maps, memory and environmental change unite the disparate locations of Speakman’s text, as do the reader’s physical movements between smartphone GPS markers. It would be easy for a work such as this to become gimmicky, or weighed down by technical finickiness, but Speakman manages to use the grammar of Google maps as a structural constraint, presenting the reader with a narrative territory both fixed to the world and intangibly layered across it”
-Times Literary Supplement
“the most effective new media work shown at Screen City Biennial…As I listened to accounts from the inhabitants of depopulated Latvian towns and of cities with rapidly encroaching coastlines, the voice-over constantly encouraged me to be mindful of where I was, to view my experiences, thoughts and feelings alongside those of others. Isn’t that what empathy is all about?”-Frieze Magazine
It Must Have Been Dark By Then t is a hybrid print and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to deliver stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no preset route, the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to the participant to choose their own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing. The experience asks the listener to seek out types of locations in their own environment, and once there it offers sounds and stories from remote but related situations. At each location the listener/reader is invited to tie those memories to the place they are in, creating a map of both where they are right now and of places that may not exist in the future.
A Folded Path / Of Sleeping Birds
2012
Collaboration with Sarah Anderson and Emilie Grenier
“Whether we were experiencing the performance or being the performers became blurred … a smile remained on my face long after the music had stopped. This carefully choreographed meander of the streets made for a bewitching evening, the haunting music a brand new city soundtrack” – Bristol Culture
A Folded Path and Of Sleeping Birds are pedestrian speaker symphonies, soundtracks for cities, carried through the streets by a participating audience, experienced by everyone it passes.
Comprising of 30, custom-built, location sensitive portable loudspeakers each playing a different element of the music we have composed. One might be playing a voice, another a sweeping violin or glistening electronic tone.
The work creates a stunning and evocative cinematic layer over the city streets. The audience, divided into groups, takes a different route through the city, coming together at certain points to create moments of harmony and resonance between them.
The GPS position of the speaker causes different sections of the composition to be played, so the structure of the work resonates with the environments it passes through. The speakers are highly directional so the movement of the people within the group changes the acoustic relationship between them, the audience become the orchestra.
Of Sleeping Birds was originally commissioned by Anglia Ruskin University + Futurecity as part of Visualise – a public art programme for Cambridge, UK 2012
When There Is Only Us
2014
Created as part of Circumstance
An intimate sci-fi opera that explores the real and fictional possibilities of terraforming. Like a film without images, fusing transmitted voices, visceral electronics and live strings, it asks what would happen if we could start all over again?
This work channels the city into the theatre, a performer roams the city, their words transmitted back to the venue. In dialogue with another performer, who remains in front of the audience, they describe the world that will be left behind. The streamed audio transmission also drags the the sound of the outside back in to the venue. Fictions are mapped on to a city that the audience know well, one on to which they can map their own memories. They listen to the sounds of a civilisation, one that at some point they will either have to abandon or save.
This composition rethinks the idea of ‘live cinema soundtracks’. Bringing together a mixture of acoustic string arrangements and electronic processing it creates an intense filmic experience that draws on real and imagined nightmares of the future of our planet.
Originally commissioned by Watershed and Al Cameron as part of BFI’s Sci Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder. Supported by the Arnolfini and Arts Council England.
For this project Circumstance was Sarah Anderson, Jessica Macdonald, Duncan Speakman and Alice Tatton-Brown
Sitting-Still-Moving
2016
collaboration with Sarah Anderson
Sitting-Still-Moving was created for the Young Tram in Guangzhou, was presented as the launch of the UK-China Year Of Cultural Exchange in the South China region. We were tasked with creating an installation for the new city tram network that would engage residents and tourists with the social and industrial history of the area. We created an audio documentary delivered through wireless headphones, controlled (using GPS) by the location of the tram. Up to 100 listeners on the tram heard a mixture of found sounds and stories from the landscape they pass while travelling, the sounds and voices resonate with the locations they are heard in, marking out a timeline of the history and reconstruction of the area. At certain moments they could put their hand against the window of the tram, at which point they would hear detailed spatial recordings from locations they could see on the other side of the river, acting like an audio telescope.
Commissioned by Times Museum Guangzhou as part of UK-China Year Of Cultural Exchange.
We Are Forests
2011
collaboration with Emilie Grenier
We Are Forests is a work for public spaces, experienced and co-authored with audiences using mobile phones. This work explored ideas of intimacy in public space over mobile networks. Experienced by audience members on their mobile phones in a public market space, it sought to try and create a work co-authored with an audience.
Participants begin the experience on their own in a crowded market, they receive a phone call which connects them to custom software so that when they speak their voice is recorded and then played to everyone else on the network.
A mixture of pre-recorded texts and ‘imaginary’ audience contributions shapes a narrative over the course of the piece. Participants slowly begin to notice each other as they drift through the market.
At the finale live singers appear amongst the crowd in the market and begin to sing the words the audience have been speaking over the course of the experience.
Commissioned by a pan-european network between Pervasive Media Studio Bristol, NiMK Amsterdam and Kitchen Budapest.