On 23 May, we gathered for a Lunchtime talk by Studio Residents Duncan Speakman, a Bristol based artist and musician and Tom Abba, a writer, designer and UWE academic, whose work explores the form of digital and physical books. They came to speak about their artists’ collective, Circumstance, presenting a selection of past work, as well as giving a taster of upcoming projects.

Duncan began his residency at the Studio in 2008, developing his ‘Subtlemobs’. Duncan invited participants to download an MP3 and turn up at a secret location to listen to the track at a specified time. This soundtrack consisted of a combination of music, narrative and instruction, which placed participants at the center of a cinematic experience. Duncan saw this project as an antidote to ‘flashmobs’, which measure their own success by the virality of films of the event, watched by people who weren’t actually there. He wanted these singular experiences to connect people with their surroundings, and for the narrative experience to blend in with the real world, not overlay it. We watched a trailer for Subtlemob, Our Broken Voice. An open source Subtlemob project has since been set up in the Netherlands and Duncan told us he was happy that the concept is being reiterated.

Duncan then took us through some projects he collaborated on with musician Sarah Anderson. In Tomorrow the Ground Forgets You Were Here, participants were given a small handheld unit, connected to headphones, and asked to walk the city. Binaural mics were attached to the headphones, and continually fed a true stereo signal of the sounds of the surroundings into a musical composition. In A Folded Path participants were given their own portable speakers to carry around. Each speaker played a different layer of the composition, so the dynamic of the music was affected by the way people moved together (or apart) in a crowd. This project was taken to Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the Audacious Festival. People carried this music through the deserted centre of the city, reconnecting with a place they had seldom visited since the earthquake.

In 2011, Tom began working with Duncan on Short Films for You, a series of six linked experiences, each lasting around ten minutes. Prompts for these experiences, in the form of audio, text and images were all encased in a book, which take their reader on a walk at dawn, to a coffee shop, and on a bus ride. This project, developed at Timelab, was a chance to create smaller, more intricate individual works. Each work, or ‘experience’ was the result of a short intensive development period, working with artists of different disciplines. The two then collaborated on a REACT Books and Print Sandbox project, These Pages Fall Like Ash, another project exploring a relationship between physical book and digital content. The book guides you to different places in the city, where you can connect to a wireless network and unlock parts of the story. Tom and Duncan are currently in the beginning stages of working with a collection of writers on a project exploring the impact of slipping between narrative viewpoints.

Circumstance are currently working on Periphery Songs; an audio documentary consisting of 4 narratives spoken by people from Hasselt, Belgium, who have a very distinct dialect. Duncan has been composing musical scores which interweave with the narratives, mimicking and embellishing the Hasselt pitch accent. The interviews are snapshot portraits of a disparate group of individuals from a particular part of Hasselt. They each talk about their own reasons for walking the city. Duncan played us a few of his compositions and we listened to the way the string instruments picked out the musical qualities of their speech.

Duncan and Tom are also working on a narrative walk that will link to an upcoming Sherlock Holmes exhibition at the Museum of London, and a concert, which, from Duncan’s description, will be a booming, visceral science fiction German opera about terraforming, where performers will travel around the city, describing what they see as though they have stumbled upon an unknown planet, while their voices are streamed live into the venue. We’ll touch base with Duncan and Tom again soon, and keep you up to date with their projects in our weekly blog.