The accurate perception available when our eye becomes single.

The project we are planning is to create an immersive multi-screen installation about the emotional specifics of place. We will be working in collaboration with sound artist Ian Thompson, and performance artist Sarah Sparkes.

‘ORFORD NESS – A Ring of Saturn’; a working title stating the location of the film and its nature of engagement with place, while exploring the elasticity of time and history, as described in W.G. Sebald’s book ‘The Rings of Saturn’.

Orford Ness is a desolate shingle spit in Suffolk that was closed off for military testing during the Cold war and retains the derelict architecture from that era.

To capture its sense of eerie dislocation sections will be filmed with an Infra-red camera in black and white. Other parts of the film will be handheld and in colour, along with slow pans and stills. Sarah Sparkes will perform atavistic ‘dance’ rituals that will appear as incidental, unexplained events, like an avatar, contrasting mythology with military.

Ian Thompson will compose a suite of accompanying electroacoustic works that reflect the location’s soundscapes and histories. These will be played simultaneously with the video projections, but not as a synchronised score; they will exist as compositions in their own right. The compositions will be presented in binaural stereo, with visitors listening on wireless headphones while walking around the exhibition.

The buildings and landscape will be the subject, allowed to speak of their past, but with nationalism on the rise, its past echoes into our future. The project will be an immersive work of psycho-geography.

By Richard Ducker & Sonya Park