The objects are navigated through echo-location, a way of building an architecture that is embedded with an acoustic memory, activated by echo. Simultaneously acting as speaker sound-systems or devices through installed tactile transducers on their wooden surfaces, they are used as a way to magnify sonic micro events; each of the multiple chambers inside channel the sound, each voice is communicated through vibration on the surface of each object in what becomes an aural animist speculative architecture. Each installed system will be positioned separately, situated high above the line of sight on readymade telegraph poles fixed into the floor, placed to form a suggestion of a structure as a whole. Each pole will be fitted with step irons, allowing the viewer to climb up and view the structure from a height as well as walking  through and under this informed tunnel of wires and light; a transmission of textural images, following the circuit through a pathway of momentary experience and subterranean memory.

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Live sound circuits that set objects in motion. Activating light and shadow into revealing and alternating over time. Creating a circuit or ecosystem of atmosphere. Designing a set of movements in the space that are all relative to each other.

 

The sound device objects themselves, made from tanalised wood, derive from different designs of manufactured enclosures for animals to nest and take shelter (specifically bats). Found in the city’s wild spaces such as Sydenham Hill Wood (London), they are intertwined with a new architecture of conservation and ancient histories of the landscape and topology. Sydenham Hill Wood is a site of new and old woodland with remnants and ruins of 19th century private estates and a rail tunnel, now made into a public space for community resources.

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Thinking through these physical and non-physical structures, ideas of speculative futures and architectures come to the fore; a way of building a site of resistance that is transient but immediate and protective. The activist architectures of Claremont Road were a place of ‘anti-road’ action against eviction in the mid 1990s, a methodological playground as a tactic against demolition of social housing.

 

A view filmed through the window of a periscope: by using the periscope object to frame the view of the installed work, the viewer’s eye and active ear are directed, channeling the aural and visual direction as would a map of a land space; acting as a static corridor, from the ground surface to the view above. The periscope object acts as a hyper-perspective model, creating an illusion of the space; a re-positioning of a view through mirrored reflection and its open framework. Creating a sense of a room, a transient temporal structure, built through refractured light; a manipulation of atmosphere and experience, a parallel environment.

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A memory of sonic events can carry information and clarity that can be a threshold for action and resistance, and listening to others. How can sonic processes contribute to a deconstruction of power over things, employing auditory spatial awareness to closely listening and directing attention to an environment. How do this way of listening to space also affect conversation?

 

By being aware that the sound is coming out of the entrances of the boxed systems, it points to how we perceive the source of the event of things. The sound is ‘alien’ to its surroundings, inviting questions about the speculative space of the original surrounding. The juxtaposition of the internal acoustics of the shelter with the changed acoustics of the recorded sound, focuses you on the spatial geography of the sound; sound redetecting distance.