Found Sound
Our practice-as-research explores embodied cultural memory and intangible cultural heritage through sound installation. We have worked in collaboration with Coventry Cathedral in support of the City of Culture programme. Our first Found Sound installation was attended by c.450 people over two days in September 2019 in the 13th Century Crypt Chapel, underneath the post-war ruins of St Michaels, as part of Coventry Heritage Open Days.
In partnership with Coventry Creates we have developed a digital version of the project online, supported by Connecting Cultures GRP and Innovative Manufacturing & Future Materials GRP, to disseminate our work digitally. The GRP support enabled us to collaborate and create an immersive sound experience for people at home, made from ‘found sound’ in the cathedral archive. This took the form of auto-generated content which you can access remotely online and/or as a socially distant artwork on site.
We are interested in the cathedral as a site of performance and learning, as much as a space for worship and reflection. Having spent a few months working with the Cathedral's archive and the multiple narratives surrounding the venue's history, we have created a feedback loop from sounds and fragments.
Our next steps...
We are in the process of establishing a new partnership with the Modern Records Centre to explore areas of digital inquiry that make use of practice-led research into embodied memory (cf. Taylor, 2003). We are developing new relationships with archives in Coventry & Warwickshire to ‘embed’ sound in digital environments (cf. Causey, 2006). We are undertaking practice online in the first instance, and therefore re-conceptualising the next stage of the process and using a practice-as-research methodology (cf. Allegue et al, 2009) which will involve the construction of a digital protoype for Found Sound II. In this next phase, we will be supported by the Centre for Digital Inquiry.
| References: Allegue, Ludivina and Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, Angela Piccini (2009), Practice-as-Research: In Performance and Screen, eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Causey, Matthew (2006), Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Similation to Embeddedness, Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, Diana (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. |
