Participatory Sound Installation; Performance
Commissioned by Goldsmiths MA Curation students
Goldsmiths CCA
A Field of Returns is a sound installation centred on a single ambisonic microphone positioned within the Oak Foundation Gallery. Capturing speech, movement and ambient activity, the system reintroduces these signals through a quadrophonic speaker arrangement, placed in the corners and oriented upwards into the volume of the space. As sound disperses, circulates and returns, traces of past interactions fold into the present, producing a continuously shifting acoustic field. The gallery is encountered not as a fixed container, but as a dynamic time-space shaped through presence, attention and repetition.
Developed in parallel, Spatial Drone III is a live performance that emerges from and acts upon this field. Using the same quadrophonic system, the work introduces, layers and recirculates captured sound, intensifying the feedback process and reconfiguring the spatial and temporal conditions of listening. Performed with Harry Burgess, voice and improvisation are fed through the system, extending its sonic register and drawing out patterns of rhythm, duration and accumulation across the space.
Spatial Drone III builds on an ongoing series in which a subtractive synthesiser is used to explore the resonant characteristics of an architectural environment. In this iteration, the principles of the series are transposed onto the live acoustic field of the installation. The performance unfolds as a listening-led process, in which sound is shaped in response to its own propagation and transformation within the space. What is heard, both aurally and somatically, determines how the system is activated, where emphasis is placed, and how resonance is sustained or withdrawn.
Presented together, the works approach the gallery as a responsive sonic environment. Moving between installation and performance, listening becomes both a perceptual and collective act, through which space is continuously produced and reoriented.
