Audience

'Audience' - Autumn/Winter 2009 :



A twenty-two speaker sound work, devised and designed for playback on the Sound Wall, at The Collection, Lincoln.

The piece is a 14 minute work for this 22 speaker system, entitled 'Audience'. The idea is simple. The physical wall that the sound wall is installed into becomes analogous to the 'fourth wall' of a theatre, i.e the audience. For a visitor to the museum standing in front of the Sound Wall when the work is playing, it is as if they are standing on a stage and hearing the sound of an invisible audience who shuffle in their seats, cough, talk amongst themselves, who applaud, cheer or heckle the unwitting 'actor'.

Audience is a designed representation of a group of spectators, reacting to various spectacles. It plays with the idea of the observer versus the observed by creating a feedback loop of observation between the viewer/listener, standing unprotected on a 'stage', facing an unseen, yet vividly real and present audience. The piece is designed to be both entertaining and striking, engendering both amusement and discomfort.

download :
Audience by Amie Slavin

click above to play an edited "sub-mix" of the piece, originally played accross the 100ft-wide sound-wall

The panoramic scale of the Sound Wall means that this invisible audience will have an extraordinarily lifelike, almost uncanny presence, as if there were a real audience concealed behind the stone façade.

‘Audience’ was made by means of participatory workshop engagement with volunteers, who joined me, in the Audio/Visual Theatre space, at The Collection, along with fellow artist, Sunshine Gray, to voice various audience behaviours and reactions.

My thanks are due to Sunshine, who leant her interactive performance style to the session, facilitating our participants to perform brilliantly.
More information about Sunshine Gray here
More information (press release) is available here (.pdf) and here (.doc).



feedback from workshop participants : Some visitor feedback :


Huge thanks to the following funders who made this project possible :