Flat out, 2019
Live environmental sound transmission, drawings on paper, conversation.
Flat out relays live sounds from open microphones on South Walney Island in Cumbria, U.K., where, in their search for food, the calls of the wading and shore birds follow the level of the tide – moving closer or further away from the microphones in dialogue with movements on the mudflats, forming a kind of “mud clock”.
The work invites audiences to engage in an act of longterm listening, and to contribute responses, questions, and propositions as part of an online exchange with the artists, who will themselves be listening in other places. The conversation will become part of a one-off publication centred around paying attention to these sounds collectively over extended periods, with the artists interested in the overlaps and offsets that can be sensed between Walney, Svolvær, and other situations where people are listening in. South Walney’s microphones are positioned in an exposed area that is closed to the public, located within a site where nuclear infrastructures, nature reserves, wind farms, and bird migration routes meet.
Soundcamp (b.2013) are an artist collective based in London, England.
