SARC Installations

Programme Notes

Susannah Knights – Tunis Cassette: a pop-up listening station (SARC Foyer)

In the 1980s, cassette technology radically changed the ways in which musical sound could be recorded, circulated and heard in Tunisia. Cassette companies were influential, popular and controversial. They gave listeners access to sounds which were excluded from state media, such as styles of popular music connected to instruments such as mezoued, zokra and gasba, or poetry which mocked the regime. But they were also embroiled in piracy scandals, and their objects sparked discussions around copyright, sound quality, technological development, and societal progress.

During her research on the politics of sound archives in the city of Tunis, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Dr Susannah Knights uncovered sounds and stories of cassettes gradually, as she rummaged through piles of the little plastic boxes in the last remaining cassette shops in the city, and examined them with former producers, collectors, and listeners. At this pop-up listening station, the visitor will be free to themselves rummage through her collection, to listen to them on Walkmans and cassette players, and to learn stories of their songs, musicians, production and circulation.

Annie Dunning – Cochlea II (Stage Box)

Cochlea II is a sound-sculpture that proposes the form of a snail’s shell as an organic sound space and listening device. The experience of holding a shell to an ear is a sonic experiment many people have performed. This act of listening to ‘the ocean’ in a shell creates a mirroring of similar structures: the spiral of the shell and the spiral-shaped organ of the inner ear from which this sculpture takes its name. There are many associations between shells and hearing across cultures. During the Victorian era in England, spiritual mediums used shells to “hear” the voices of the dead – particularly those who had died at sea. In France, one of the oldest known human prosthetics was discovered – an ear carved from a shell and surgically implanted in the skull of a neolithic woman.

The audio element of this sculpture is a recording of ocean waves on a pebbled shore that I made on Malcom Island, on the west coast of Canada. The shore is always a place where the terrestrial world engages with the oceanic – a meeting and colliding of worlds. The beach at Bere Point is particularly special because it is one of the few places accessible to humans where whales come to rub themselves on the pebbles in the shallow water. Here the whales rid themselves of barnacles and parasites while researchers watch and listen from shore.

Back in the studio, I used the glass shell to bend and transform the audio, demonstrating how the resonant tone of an object can shape sound. To create the soundtrack, I inserted a small microphone into the core of the glass shell and then played the recording of waves into the opening, to be re-recorded by the internal microphone. This new track was then played through the shell and again recorded. After about six passes through the glass shell the water sounds were completely transformed. The progression from unaltered wave sounds to the final transformed sound makes up the 10-minute audio sound-track that plays on a loop and accompanies this sculpture. I’m curious what other sensory experiences humans could have beyond the five senses described by Western culture. Perhaps we can grow our capacity for experience by looking to the fascinating qualities of other species.

Sara Constant – I’ve been wanting to tell you- (Interaction Lab)

In this installation, tiny microphones and loudspeakers twist repeatedly in place while emitting soft clicks and sinewaves, moving in and out of phase with one another.

As the microphones and loudspeakers swing near one another, their own resonant frequencies bleed into the sounds they create—causing a gentle wavering in their sinewaves and infusing the clicks with new tones.

Occasionally, these motions generate a brief moment of acoustic feedback, which in turn sparks the loudspeakers to alter the frequencies that they emit. The result is a slowly-shifting sonic landscape in which analog phenomena spark fleeting moments of intervention within a compulsive, digital system—aiming to describe, from the point of view of the microphone itself, what it means to try to speak.

Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz Melbye – Queer Sonic Fingerprint (Surround 2)

In their multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker speculatively imagine non-normative relations around artefacts in ethnological museums and beyond. This multimodal sonic work was created collaboratively during research on queering ethnological museum collections. Queer Sonic Fingerprint engages with ethnographic collection artefacts sonically, hereby breaking with the visual primary and no-touch policy of museums. The work is based on a collection of ‘sonic fingerprints’ (also known as impulse responses): sounds that represent the sonic properties of different collection items’ bodies. These sounds populate a queered genetic algorithm, an AI tool that simulates kin relations.

Through this algorithm, the sonic fingerprints of different collection artefacts can reproduce, exchange properties, mutate and relate to each other. The genetic algorithm we have created, however, does not rely on a Darwinian model of evolution and kinship, but is instead queered, meaning that is relies on work from the anthropology of kinship, queer kinship, speculative fiction, and alternative biological research into evolution and kinship, such as endosymbiosis and epigenetics. Alongside the evolving sounds of new possible artefacts in this sonic ecology, the work features atmospheric recordings of museum spaces and depots, conversations with museum practitioners and other interlocutors.

Isaac Gibson – Heart-Felt: Sound, Story, and the Human Heartbeat (Room 23)

Heart-Felt is an encounter with a single voice and the rhythm of the body that carried it. In a small listening space, you sit close to a quiet array of speakers and feel the same person’s recorded heartbeat through a haptic vest. Their image lingers in front of you, a reminder of presence as much as absence.

A button invites you to move between voices. Each press shifts the perspective: a new story, a new pulse, a new face. The words arrive as fragments – memories, pauses, confessions – more suggestive than complete. The heartbeat underlines them, steady or fragile, always human.

There is no beginning or end. The piece unfolds at your pace, guided by touch, hearing, and feeling. What remains is not a single story but the impression of being with others, momentarily connected through sound and pulse.

Visitors are also invited to record their own heartbeat with a contact microphone, along with a short, spoken memo or memory, contributing to a growing archive that may shape a future iteration of the work.

Lola de la Mata – TAC(I)ET, an implied silence (Broadcast Studio, Wed – Fri)

Fielding through cymatics, photography and tinnitus, Lola de la Mata presents works as artifacts of the invisible. Each photogram captures glass prototype instruments and metal tools used in the creation of the conceptual album ‘Oceans on Azimuth’.

Emerging from the depths of the cochlea, the prints draw on reveries of a submerged world. Here, the sculptural forms are reminiscent of bone, membrane or tissue found in the middle and inner ear.

Standing in the space is Lola’s Tacit Harp. A custom acoustic metal rod instrument developed in collaboration with percussion maker Matt Nolan. Its unique scale was selected from recordings made at the Hudspeth Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, Rockefeller University NY, of Lola’s spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs), which she experiences as tinnitus. These recordings won a Sound of the Year award in 2023.

TAC(I)ET is a tactile surround experience vibrating air, which encourages the ears in attendance to play additional tones, forming a uniquely un/over-heard composition.

Lusine Kirakosyan – LEZU (Broadcast Studio, Sat only)

LEZU is an interactive performance that transforms the Armenian alphabet into sound and visuals. Using custom-built controllers, each letter becomes a musical tone that generates real-time visuals. The projections unfold across eight layered textile screens, making the letters float in the air and creating an immersive, improvised experience where language comes alive as a blend of music and image.