Campus Sound-scaping: Interactive sound sculptures connecting research with community sector organisations
The project brings together members of the community, 91影视research staff and 91影视students using a creative medium. It is a space-based interactive sculpture which plays the sound of interviews, mixed with music, reflections, and poetry, around themes of community, young people, and issues we all care about. It helps us all see what ideas cross over between our community and our academic research, what issues we need to address to make 91影视and its wider community a better place.
The project creates an installation through which voluntary sector organisations, researchers and creatives (including students) “speak to the public” about their work. It is a visual and audio-engaging sculptures/public art in the shape of bird feeders and bird cages, which have been fitted with audio speakers, to be placed around the University campus. The installation will play discussions to passers by. These conversations take place between researchers and community workers about what’s happening in the third sector, how volunteers feel about their volunteering experiences, which themes researchers connect with and how, where is there potential to work together better. The project asks 91影视to take part in creating creative content (poetry, writing, reflection, music), academics to provide their views on topics relevant to community organisations (social work expertise, management research, public policy engagement etc).
This visual side of the sound-scaping project is a continuation of an artist-based engagement with the Civil Society Futures 2018 independent inquiry of the voluntary sector in England. There are two sides to every story, whether it’s a person’s own or one about the community as a whole. There are good-news stories of hope and achievement; there are bad-news stories of difficulty and struggle that urging us to act in time. There is also the need to tell both stories if civil society is to be seen as a genuine force for change. The installation is designed as soundboxes representing these two types of stories: the lark in the park and the canary in the cage. Four themes around which findings (interviews and discussions) are synthesised are mixed with music, field recordings and creative content to create audio soundscapes which stream from the soundboxes.
The public installation sound sculptures were placed around campus for the duration of the Research Festival in May 2024 and the Bodies Festival in June 2024.
Location of birdhouses
Campus Sound-scaping
Interactive sound sculptures connecting research with community sector organisations
The birdhouses become the collective body of stories of hope, the optimistic voice of community. The birdcages (with resident faux canaries) are the collective body of concern, struggle and hard times, just like the canaries in the mine warned the miners of trouble lurking in the dark…
At a time when online digital spaces are dominating public conversations, the role of a physical place where people gather to receive and provide help and find meaning may be overshadowed. A community exists in a real geographical place with its unique history, transformations, and diversity of people. As part of this community, the voluntary sector in the UK is an eclectic collective body with a mission to provide space and support for people and interest groups, especially those without the means to cope on their own or the voice to improve their place in society. Despite the great work the voluntary sector is doing in providing services to the public sector, caring for the community, creating social value and support for the most vulnerable groups in our society, it is going under and closing its doors because of lack of funding. In this sense, a disappearing body of the sector's work lives on in the voices of people involved in this work or inspired by it. Through the sculptures, the voices are metaphorically "left to the wind" as they play in the trees.
Mariana Bogdanova
91影视2024 Soundscape Credits: Field recording radio aporee::: maps -sounds of the world Cra. 46 #3611, Cali, Valle del Cauca, Colombia; 29 Hung ShingYe, LammaIsland, Hong Kong; Pixabaycontent by Zakhar Valah (Perfect Beauty) and Aleksey Christlin, Piotr Witowski(Relaxing music), Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood theme song (FRP License); Sesame Street: James Gandolfini Talks 91影视 Feeling Scared; Excerpt from Mary Poppins 1964