Co-created with, and curated by, Nina Garthwaite and Eleanor McDowall, Soundhouse was a cinema for audio built in the Barbican foyers.
The structure existed for a month as a low-lit sanctuary; audiences nestled into swinging cocoon chairs, listening to a constantly-playing audio loop of documentary, drama and sound art.
Soundhouse was also home to a series of listening events, and accompanied by a book with essays from Nina and Eleanor, Edwin Brys, Cathy FitzGerald, Renay Richardson, Farokh Soltani and Jon Tjhia. I wrote a foreword, and the book's cover contained a series of postcards designed by Nina.
A couple of excerpts from Nina and Eleanor's essay:
The Soundhouse project has emerged from a question: What if radio and podcasting could occupy public space? What if those mediums could mark out territory in artistic institutions like the Barbican, sit in ‘listening cinemas’, or be found in the equivalent of a concert hall or record shop? Would we think differently about the artistic ‘value’ of the medium, and how it’s funded, curated and critiqued? Would we do a better job of interrogating its structural problems? Could a public space to gather, listen to and critique work offer a challenge to the invisible issues in an overlooked artform?
...We have supplied cocooned swing seating to offer a listener both a light sense of movement and an element of privacy; dim lighting; a focus on comfort and cosiness and a flexibility in the listener’s focal point. Over the course of the month we have curated a series of events that will employ these elements more directly, from meditative mind-wandering sessions to a dream-like listening event under artificial starlight to an exploration of how what you see effects how you hear.