Creative Communities

Last November I finished work on a community project in Addlestone, Surrey. I worked with a group of teenagers at Addlestone Youth Centre, exploring all sorts of stuff. Stop frame animation, time lapse, interviews with the older generation, found sound, and ended up with a 25 minute movie. The final work was exhibited at Chertsey Museum in a space designed with help from Rachana Jadhav.

Why does someone who’s work is mostly with noise end up with a movie? The problem with sound is that it is ephemeral. Unlike a picture it can not be stopped and examined, when it is stopped all there is is silence. The first place people go with sound is music, usually their favourite genre of music and then want to make that without thinking, or exploring much further. There is nothing wrong with that, but that is not what I am about. Another distraction when exploring sound is thinking how something sounds like something else, rather than focusing on it’s quality in and of itself, divorced from any interpretation. This kind of abstract thinking is quite difficult if you are not used to it, so I thought this time I’d work with an analogy. I thought I could use an exploration of moving and still images could be a way of generating a language with which to deal with sound. Exploring texture, pattern and form with film in the same way I would with sound. So we went off on a tangent and did not come back to sound until the very end of the project.

These two videos are from the final exhibit and in a way they are really sound works.