A Stranger Calls - 2024 - developed in Collaboration with Philip Speakman
The Stranger Calls is a sonic investigation into where the line between paranoid speculation and historical fact exists and where we choose to place belief. An investigation in audio weaponry, how it is used or could be used, imagining a situation in which hearing has become dangerous and making sound a tool of the nefarious and the revolutionary. The Broadcast is an experimental collection of fictional and transcriptional discussion, found audio and curious frequencies, in part an overview of the history of sonic manipulation, alongside a speculative report of the potentials of sonic weaponry. This Broadcast was aired on RTM for the September 2024 season. Developed in collaboration with Philip Speakman
PychoPhone - 2024 - Developed in Collaboration with Philip Speakman
PychoPhone explores the experience of receiving a phone call from an unknown number in the middle of the night, as a motif to analyse the fears and fantasies arising from disembodied voices and the eerie anonymity and uncanny reflections produced by our communication technologies. The moving image work tells the story of a group of late night message board users discovering they’ve all experienced the same strange late night phone call, and the speculations, theories and conspiracies which spiral out from this odd nocturnal encounter. Told in the form of a conversation combining both scripted and verbatim dialogue between online message board user, the discussion is performed by artificial voice actors and then animated using facial animation technologies, ‘puppeting’ images as eerie stand ins for the unseen posters.
Drawing on research into the occult and spiritualist origins of early telecommunication technologies, the work connects our current hyper-networked moment to a historical continuum of anxieties around transmitting the human voice across space.
One Degree form Blackwater - 2023
In this film I look at the Bradwell power station in Bradwell-on-sea alongside the resurgence of the Peregrine Falcon. The bird almost died out in the 50s but then made a massive recovery, mimicking the decline and resurgence of nuclear power in Essex.
The birdwatcher is engaged in a complex exchange of prey and predator behaviours, staying hidden in their hunt for the Birds who in turn see them, hide from and evade them. The station carries the threat of infection or poisoning, that it could play a role in changing your body or mind, almost parasitic. But control is also exercised in a more covert way when it comes to energy, energy is not only sold to the customer, the customer is sold to the energy. When what we want becomes what we need, are we moved to a system in which we have no choice.
One Thousand Tentacular Grips - 2020
One thousand Tentacular Grips takes its audio from scrabbling forum entries written by people potentially experiencing Delusional parasitosis.
After listening their clothes take on a certain smell. Some like to keep the sound on tape, to covet and protect it.
Wash the bugs away, careful not to spill a crumb of food it could feed them for months.
Be clean and be quiet.
You have to collect samples on tape, they grow into the black gnat which does not fly that well. There is also a kind of fly which looks like a moth when it is flying around.
I very clearly feel them, when they are moving and when they are not moving or perhaps when they are not present.
It narrows to 20cm everyday and formats sufficiently. Now imagine that you are strapped with messages of the utmost importance. Certain that they are all a matter of life and death.
Messages that take hold of the separated being and supports nothing but the next immediacy.
Musical shards act as soundtrack to happy bugs never stopping to begin again. The soundtracks folded into themselves and buzzing was inserted just out of digestible range.