Audiovisual residency at the Bathway Theatre, Woolwich, Greenwich University’s SOUND/IMAGE Research Centre during the summer of 2025. The residency was in collaboration with digital video artist Will Young.

We explored turntablism, noise and environment using a variety of analogue and digital tools in the 360 AV space.

Funded by the Arts Council via the DYCP program. Many thanks to Dr Brona Martin, Liam Frizell, Ryley Pennycard and all at SOUND/IMAGE and Bathway Theatre. Film by Made in Motion.

From the SOUND/IMAGE blog:

The initial Arts Council DYCP funding award was to undertake some r&d with digital video artist Will Young (a longtime friend and collaborator), Dr Brona Martin and the SOUND/IMAGE technical team during a residency at the Bathway Immersive Theatre. The expectation was that Will and myself would run some tests and find some ways to work with each other in the space. We would go away to conceive and develop a full immersive ‘show’ after the residency as a separate undertaking. However, the experience proved to be deeply collaborative and generative, resulting in an emergent approach to AV improvisation that was significantly more well-formed aesthetically and conceptually than we could have hoped for.

The first few weeks I was working with Dr Brona Martin and technican Liam Frizzle, both in the theatre space and the Spatial Audio Lab, finding ways to work with the various multi-channel sound systems. My turntablist practice provides some challenges with working with spatial audio as it is intrinsically tied to the use of a stereo DJ mixer and hardware effects units. A previous approach, developed for a very specific piece in a specific place, proved not to translate well. With the guidance and support of Dr Martin and audio technician Liam Frizzle, I was able to develop a way of working, using all of the speakers in the Bathway Theatre including the IKO 3D Loudspeaker. This approach was more concerned with building a virtual sound system, accentuating the sense of a sonic ‘depth-of-field’ I already use in my work, rather than using lots of individual sound sources.  

After a weekend working in his studio in Bristol, Will Young joined for the final week when we had 4 continuous days in the theatre. The initial plan with the visual aspect was to work entirely in Unreal Engine, as this is the platform that Will works with to create fixed pieces of digital art. However, it became rapidly apparent that Unreal does not lend itself easily to being an improvisatory performance paradigm and things that were relatively easy to achieve in other platforms were far from straight-forward. We quickly decided to limit the use of the software to adapting his custom particle engine into a audio-visual 360 granular delay effect, and Will concentrated his efforts on using various cameras on live objects in the space – primarily the set of damaged and degraded vinyl records I had extracted from my mum’s shed after 20 odd years that I had been using for the audio aspect. We then worked closely with the Bathway Theatre visual technician Riley Pennycard to control the lighting in the space to mirror the depth-of field approach I was taking with the audio.

Given these challenges, and the short amount of time myself and Will had working together in the theatre leading up to the show-and-tell event, it felt somewhat miraculous that we had something to show! However, the end result felt playful, improvisatory, site-specific and, dare I say it, immersive. Having access to this kind of technology to work with is already a great privilege, but the end result is a real testament to the engaged, curious and very ‘yes and..’ approach to the support and mentorship we received from the SOUND/IMAGE team. Both myself and Will left the residency not only having learned a lot, but with renewed creative energy and the desire to play more.