Duncan Speakman

‘short films for you’

it’s easy to become comfortable if you keep doing the same thing
this residency is about taking risks and challenging my established methods

For the past few years I’ve been making headphone based experiences, usually designed to be listened to in public spaces. The work leans towards the epic and the cinematic, and the making process stretches out over many months, there are almost never physical objects involved and I often work with the same team of collaborators.



This winter in Timelab I will be changing and challenging a lot of these methods. 
Rather than a singular experience I want to create a group of miniature works. I still intend them to be cinematic experiences, but as a collection of short films rather than one singular experience.  They will still be based on audio experiences that place the listener in the middle of this ‘film’, with the world around them becoming the set and action, but the collection will be housed in some form of book, a real physical object. This book may contain instructions for locations to visit or actions to undertake while listening to the audio, or it may contain visual cues or objects that link to the experiences. 
Each piece should create a triangle of connections, where the object in your hands, the place you are in and the sound in your ears all interact with each other. 

I’m also changing the way I work, each piece in the collection will be made in collaboration with a different artist, one with a photographer from Gent ( Reinout Hiel ), one with a writer from Bristol (Tom Abba, http://www.tomabba.com/ ) , another with a sound artist from Brussels (Els Viaene - http://www.aurallandscape.net/ ) and the last with a performer from Tokyo ( Yoko Ishiguro http://bit.ly/uSUhja ).
 Each one made in a short intensive working session over a few days, each one responding to the last, creating a thread through the project. 
We don’t know exactly where we’re going yet, but we know we will start by following someone.

I’m think i’m a little afraid
but i’m also very excited

Duncan Speakman
--  http://productofcircumstance.com twitter: @ofcircumstance
 
Duncan Speakman is an artist whose work explores how we use sound to navigate social and physical environments. His recent work has focused on headphone based experiences that draw on cinematic styles and create participatory performances in public spaces.

There is an underlying agenda to explore how mobile technology can be 'hacked' to create more engagement with the user's immediate environment (as opposed to the ability to connect to remote locations/people, which in turn creates an isolating effect in a shared social space.)