Introduction

In Line With The Lighthouse was a collection of live-streamed broadcasts of acoustic habitats found at Winterton-On-Sea, Norfolk, UK across the 9th and 10th of October, 2021. 

The performance comprised two separate Live-Streams. 

The first, a 24hour fixed location broadcast from a selected spot on Winterton Dunes. The sound was captured by a DIY stereo location microphone rig developed as part of the HomeSounds project.

The second, a roaming broadcast from a number of locations amongst the dunes that ran loosely in a line from the Winterton Lighthouse to the sea. 

The two streams were broadcast through the LocusSonus Soundmap, a collection of live-streaming microphones from around the world.

The HomeSounds project encourages everyone, particularly young people, to become Active Environmental Listeners. Through this work we have found many people, of all ages, desperately seeking the experiences that often accompany purposeful listening. Solace, trust, inspiration, understanding, space, confidence, faith.

In Line With The Lighthouse encouraged you to listen and wait; to foster what Miriam Rose Ungunmerr calls 'quiet, still, awareness'. It asked the audience to reflect on human responses to the transient nature of an eroding coastline, and through listening, balance these responses with those of the non-human natural world. That is not to belittle the human response but to try, by listening, to truly understand it, and from this point seek to appreciate how these responses shape our interactions with, and influence upon, the world around us. In the fearful context of a climate crisis, it is hard not to hear the fearful noises of humanity in the barren winds, roaring waves and wispish grasses of Winterton Dunes, and to question the wisdom of any Cnut-like efforts to command the sea. 

The renowned composer and sound-ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp has described listening as a cycle; our consciousness forever travelling between the world outside and the world within. Sound influences Self influences Sound. In Line With The Lighthouse invited you to take this tidal journey, and consider what is eroded away, what landscape is changed, with each wave of sound.

About

In Line With The Lighthouse has been commissioned as part of Moveable Estates, a 30-minute audio artwork, created by the spatial practitioners Cooking Sections, for an Arts Council funded project known collectively as ‘New Geographies’. Cooking Sections were commissioned to produce an artwork for the New Geographies project by East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, as one member of the group ECVAN (the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network) who created the project. 

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