Output details

Sonic Wallpapers

These are the research questions underpinning Sonic Wallpapers:

• How can field-recording practices be used to expand on how Museums engage audiences with their collections? In this specific instance, to engage audiences in new and unexpected ways with historic wallpaper samples?

• How can material artefacts (such as wallpaper) and everyday domestic practices (such as home-decorating) be utilised and treated as specific contexts for the creation of sound art?

• What are the new audience/artist relationships facilitated by the internet, and how might artists and museums explore them together?

This project took place between 2011 and 2012, while the touring exhibition continues to be available for hire, and the project diary remains online in perpetuity (http://sonicwallpapers.blogspot.com). The project grew from an experimental series of workshops of the same name presented at MoDA by Ford in 2009 (http://adri.mdx.ac.uk.contentcurator.net/felicity-ford%20%5Bcopy%5D). These workshops explored the concept of wallpaper sample books as stimuli for projects themed around the notion of the domestic soundscape, and the home as both a sonic and social site of meaning.

Sonic Wallpapers (2011 - 2012) had several objectives in line with the research questions at the core of the project:

• To develop methodologies for using field-recordings to expand the sorts of conversations we might have or the way we might think about something as prosaic as wallpaper.

• To use the project to stimulate personal reflections about wallpaper amongst audiences, and to connect the collection of wallpapers at MoDA with individual memories and the syntax and discourse of Home Decorating practices.

• To share the project in online and offline contexts, allowing for a variety of different exchanges to take place across social media and in real environments as The UK Knitting & Stitching Show.