Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Lancaster University
The quiet volume
The Quiet Volume, made in collaboration with Ant Hampton, is an 'automatic' performance for two audience members at a time and is presented in functioning libraries. The participants sit side-by-side; taking cues from words both written and whispered over headphones they find themselves burrowing an unlikely path through a pile of books and notebooks on the table in front of them. Interacting with the library environment the piece investigates the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience, allowing deeply internal processes that are usually unnoticed to enter consciousness, to lean out into the surrounding space, and to leak from one reader's sphere into another's.
Based on interaction with the audience (who are the sole ‘performers’ of the piece) the work explores theatre as imaginative (virtual and conceptual) action, here linked deeply to the activities of language processing and semantic unpacking inherent in the act of reading. The work asks questions about the role of the audience, about the relation between text and site, about the act of reading itself and about the use and re-use of existing text materials in new composition. Looked at in another way the work is effectively a sound score – an unfolding and technically complex dramaturgy of electronically manipulated voices, sound elements and field recordings. This binaural stereo score won Ant Hampton and I a Bessie Award in New York in 2013.
To date, there are English, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian-Portuguese, Slovenian, Dutch, Japanese and German versions of The Quiet Volume. Estimated audience for the piece since it began is in excess of 8000 people. The work has been discussed at numerous conferences and discussion events (see attached portfolio).
