ADRIFT

About the work: From the festival brochure written by Jeanine Griffin and Jan Verwoert. ‘In his sound works Neil Webb unframes time and creates places for thinking. Against the backdrop of a contemporary event culture that steadily increases the daily dose of media stimulation, Webb seeks to create moments of interruption that allow you to recalibrate your senses. For his sound installation in the Winter Garden he works with diverse recordings: the ambient sound of people within the building is mixed with sounds of the building’s inner workings and external sound sources from nature. The recordings are further defamiliarised by being played back through water rather than air in the post-production process. The mix is then presented through ‘surface exciting speakers’, which activate glass surfaces within the building’s architecture as speakers. As the glass building literally becomes the sounding board for the water-modulated sounds, pockets of the environment will be transformed into something more akin to an aquarium. By altering the basic framework for the experience of the place, the piece attempts to create an alternative choreography for the way people may move through this environment, slowing down their pace and potentially opening up pockets of empty time for different thoughts and sensations.’ Approach to the work: Adrift was constructed to enable listeners in the Winter Gardens to take time and open up to listening, to heighten another sense rather than just seeing with their eyes. The installation is in parts meditative and site specific being designed specifically for the Winter Gardens. I am particularly interested in areas of sound practice concerning listening behavior and ‘noise’ in our environments. The recordings for Adrift were made with conventional stereo microphones and unconventional microphones such as hydrophones and contact microphones. Locations for these recordings included the Dorset and North East coast line and in the Winter Gardens itself. I have developed a body of work that uses unconventional materials to transmit sound.For Adrift I used ‘surface exciting’ speakers to activate glass and metal and transform them into speakers. So in the case of Adrift the sounds were played through large panes of glass in the Winter Garden.