Pop Quiz

It’s 3pm, day one of my joint residency with Sam Underwood at Pervasive Media Studio, and we’re discussing the general availability of radioactive isotopes and how we could feasibly extend, or bend, a Geiger counter.

Day two, and I’m drawing childish pictures of illogical and / or dangerous instruments. Most of them involve terrifying personal injury to anyone foolish enough to play them. They’re heavily inspired by reading about Tipu’s Tiger, an 18th century exhibit at the V&A museum.

All of this obscene merriment is thanks to a project Sam has been chipping away at for several years now: a semi-covert operation wherein he secretes sound-making technology into public spaces, grafting self-contained modules onto the side of buildings. If you can find them, you often have to work out how to activate them. Sometimes it takes more than one body to do so.

We’re investigating how my writing practice can augment or alter the experience of seeking out and operating these modules – maybe there’s a linear story somewhere in there, a unifying narrative, but at the moment we’re not obsessing over it. Rather we’re talking broad themes, the potential dramatic charge of the technology, the clusters of related emotions… and we seem to be settling on joint ideas of danger, decay, injuries and alarms.

The start point for this apocalyptic vision was a train of thought list I wrote several weeks ago on the subject of “Sounds Of Warning.”

> Learning to love the alarms and surprises > With the calm certainty of the Geiger counter > Electric rattlesnakes, circuit-board cicadas > The tension of the approach > A dangerous instrument, sentient, volatile > The jungle beckons – closes around you > Some creatures desire you, still others will eat you > We’re all part of the circuit > The circuit’s alive > The simple delight as you trip the alarm > You’re breaking in; leaving traces; to hell with it > The unseen substances, made to sound like notes on a stave > The deadliest creatures sing the sweetest tunes > Insectoid > Violent science > Uncertain, insistent > Alerts and automations, pings and bleeps > Low on fuel / Lower pulse / Low pressure > Beautiful flickering lights to tell you it’s dying > Entropy detectors, increasing in rhythm > Making the fear into a memorable music > To calmly inform you you’re about to crash > To sweetly chime when the ghost walks past > Hazard crackle > Failure song > Four-note tone means neutron burst > Five-note tone means 10 minutes oxygen > Six-note tone is lifeboat gone

Before Sam and I even met for the first time (up until September we knew each other only as synchronised beards on Skype) this seemed to be our favoured angle. Outside of this residency I’m writing about a post-apocalyptic landscape for a Sleepdogs project called Tales From The Old World, and Sam plays resonant, all-consuming doom metal as part of his tuba duo, Ore. It’s a comfort: whatever the challenges of this collaboration, the unlimited horrors of the universe will unite us.

We know, at the heart of it, we’ll be making ‘instruments’, playable or triggered by anyone with the right tools. And we know we’ll want those instruments to reflect a sense of location, of space somehow transposed and manipulated via sonics. But for now that’s about all we know. We’re even talking about instruments that are operated by pouring a jar of beetles onto them.

Sam sends me a batch of excited emails about storm drains and abandoned swimming pools in the Bristol area. I look at Soviet-issue radiation detectors on eBay. We ruminate upon what parameters you’d need to set for a laser temperature reader to activate something in the presence of a warm human.

Sharon Clark, working on her own Stick House magnum opus at the studio, comes over and talks to us about how she’s trying to avoid any overt trappings of gaming in her project, hoping to ensure that the participants don’t feel there’s a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to their decisions, trying not to frighten them. Sam and I agree that we’re also keen on those first two ambitions – but as for the last, at the moment… we suspect we might be looking to scare our audience shitless.