An augmented audio walk by Duncan Speakman

"I found him digging around in the ashes of what was left. He said ‘You won’t shoot me’, I said ‘I’ve lost everything, got nothing else to lose’"

Award-winning composer and Pervasive Media Studio resident Duncan Speakman invites you to experience an augmented audio walk through Bristol, one that seamlessly combines the sound of your surroundings with an evocative music score and recordings of changing environments from across the globe.

As sea levels rise and wildfires burn, Only Expansion remixes the sound of Bristol so you can experience sonically how your own life might change in the future. A beautifully made guidebook prompts you to explore the city, choosing your own route, while headphones with customised electronics capture and manipulate the sounds around you. Voices of passers by become a choir, bus brakes create pulsating rhythms, these might then be blended with desert winds from Tunisia or the crumbling coasts of Norfolk.

A visceral and poetic reflection on what it means to live on a planet in crisis, Only Expansion connects the here to the elsewhere, letting you experience our tangled ecology through sound.

"A transporting, time-shifting, epic, unsettling and moving walk. I know that this is a complex, detailed creation. But it’s beauty is in the simple act of being on my own, in my familiar day, looking and then looking again at the space that no longer has me in it." - Kate Yedigaroff, MAYK / Mayfest

Only Expansion is commissioned by University of Exeter Arts And Culture. It was developed with support from Lydgalleriet Bergen, Theatre in The Mill Bradford, and Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants.

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