Wrights & Sites

Wrights & Sites is a group of artist-
researchers with a special relationship
to site, city/landscape and walking.
http://www.mis-guide.com/index.html

making routes

Making Routes is a peer-led laboratory for researchers and practitioners interested in the relationship between performance and journeys.

We are interested in:

•The narrative of journeys

•Movement through space and time as an act of writing, re-writing, or myth-making

•Walking practices as acts of reclaiming and resistance

•The spaces of performance (situated) in dialogue with the spaces of journeys (dynamic)

•Journeys as a model for the exchange of cultures and behaviours; an act of ‘setting roots in motion’ (Bourriaud, 2009)

David Overend:

My research interests are interdisciplinary and focus on contemporary theatre and performance. I am currently working on performance and journeys, site-specific theatre and relational aesthetics. My practice and research strongly determine and inform each other.

Hogmany Games

Take on the challenge of the Labyrinth: a twisting sonic journey through St Giles’ Cathedral, with a minotaur at its heart. Can you reach the centre without being spotted? A game of sound, movement and monsters – come along and play, or just listen to the evolving musical score from composer Pippa Murphy.

Cybraphone

Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components, all housed in a modified wardrobe. Its emotions are shown on a 100 year old school galvanometer; a motor-driven crank drives the bellows of an Indian classical instrument modified with 13 robotic servos; a switched fan pumps air through a Farfisa organ retro-fitted with robotic keys; 12 chimes are struck by suspended solenoids; numerous percussion instruments are hit by beaters attached to motors, including a cigar box with an integral spring “reverb”; and a purpose made vinyl record is cued robotically to play through antique brass gramophone horns. In addition to these musical components, Cybraphon has several internal light sources that are controlled on four fader channels, and infra-red motion detectors to monitor people watching it.

Found electronics

Martin Parker – out there

Writing for headphones

Filmmakers well know how music interprets image and have trained us to respond to this device, it may explain why we carry around these sounds as they help us to re-interpret our environment as a cinematic and visual experience. Portable music players offer a personal, private space for individuals to re-see their world but we now also behave with music in a way that is perhaps different to modes of listening and access we’ve had up until recently. ‘Flash mobs’ [5] (where groups of people gather to perform acts of guerrilla resistance or individuality) are also associated with portable music players. ‘Silent Disco’ [6] and ‘Mobile Clubbing’ [7] are events where people dance together whilst listening to their own choice of music through headphones [8].

Christina Kubish

Works with Electromagnetic Induction

Toward the end of the 1970s, I used the system of electromagnetic induction for my sound installations for the first time. As a principle of acoustic transmission, it is based on the sounds resulting from the mutual interaction of magnetic fields. These fields arise on the one hand from electrical wires traversing the room, in which sounds circulate, and on the other from headphones with magnetic coils, which I developed myself. This system, which I have constantly further developed technically and artistically, was the starting point for numerous sound installations realized all over the world since 1980. The basic idea of these sound spaces is to provide the viewer/listener access to his own individual spaces of time and motion. The musical sequences are experiencable in ever-new variations through the listener’s motion. The visitor becomes a “mixer” who can put his piece together individually and determine the time frame for himself.

some sound artists

Here are some sound artists…….

Bruce Neuman http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/nauman/

Sarah Philipz http://theendofbeing.com/2010/12/06/lowlands-sound-sculptor-susan-philipsz-wins-the-turner-prize/

Paul Rooney (we have worked with him in the Royal Infirmary) http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=72

‘In writing the texts, I often work with people to engage with the particular roles they occupy in various ways, highlighting everyday practices, and peripheral positions, as potential sites for creativity and resistance to wider social structures. Recent works have involved collaborating with a TV audience warm up man, residents of a tower block, and a speech and language therapy patient. The work extends to engage with how we occupy or engage with specific physical places, in a more poetic or imaginative sense. Pop music, along with many forms of culture, often relies for its power on wider imaginative worlds that are associated with the artists or context, worlds which extend much further than the initial pop song or comedy routine, often blurring the line between truth and fiction.’

Voice-over sound tracks are key elements, referencing narrative forms such as songs, audio guides, sermons and other modes of storytelling, spoken from the position of a variety of roles or personas, such as a nightclub cloakroom attendant, a tourist guide or a fanzine writer. The works provide a contemplative space for the viewer to engage with the spoken or sung texts on the soundtracks.

Jim Finer http://www.scoreforaholeintheground.org/

Katie Paterson http://www.katiepaterson.org/vatnajokull/

Bill Fontana http://www.resoundings.org/

I have worked for the past 30 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. These have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world including San Francisco, New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Venice, Sydney and Tokyo.

My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a living source of musical information. I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear and that music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, is a process that is going on constantly.

 

Artists/practitioners with specific experience of working with visually impaired people:

Kaffe Matthews http://www.kaffematthews.net/

Frerens Art Gallery http://www.museumsassociation.org/museum-practice/access-visually-impaired-visitors/15092011-creating-inclusive-museum-environments/15092011-ferens-art-gallery

Cormac Faulkner http://cormacfaulkner.wordpress.com/

Cormac Faulkner is an Irish sound artist now based in Coventry. His work is concerned with our reaction to different spaces and how our behavior and understanding can change when presented with new information and new ways of exploring them. He is a multi-disciplinary artist and use sound, video and photography in his work

Imperial College/Royal College of Art http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_19-7-2011-9-51-55

Holyrood Palace

I liked the audio guide:

1. Good instructions
2. Good descriptions
3. More detail (hsitory or description) optional
4. Guide to many rooms inside and to grounds and Abby
5. Instructions to ask wardens for more information (which I did)
6. The words were friendly and helpful
7. Many rooms on view
8. Seats available in many rooms
9. There was a warden in every room

Not so good:

1. Finding the entrance and ticket office
2. The “on” and “off” buttons of the audio guide were close together in the middle of the hand set.  I pressed the wrong button and had to ask a warden for help. (information at beginning not too clear!)
3. The last flight of stairs before the exit were of dark stone and required care.

A walk to work in Leith

I enjoyed:

1. Hearing the names, dates and histories of the buildings
2. Hearing the descriptions of the decorations on them
3. Catching glimpses of old lanes and yards as we went past
4. Speculating on the painted advertisements above the shops
5. Appreciating the open space beside the river
6. Sitting in the sun hearing about the old church
7. Seeing inside the old converted warehouse at Fran’s studio

I have often been told to look up, but I now need a good description of what can be seen.  And historical facts add to my enjoyment.

Fuel Theatre

Fuel Theatre have commissioned a series of podcasts created especially for you to enjoy at a particular time and place.

Imagine there was a soundtrack to those small moments when you find yourself alone, brushing your teeth, in the bath, watching the rain stream down your living room window, or when you’re tucked up in bed unable to sleep.

Artists making the podcasts with us include: Inua Ellams, Nic Green, John Hegley, Kazuko Hohki, Adrian Howells, Josie Long, Peggy Shaw, Hofesh Shechter, Lemn Sissay, and Nick Whitfield.
One podcast a month will be released throughout 2011. 

Listen here