Mapping the Sound: charting deep time through new lenses
New add-on project for the Deep Time Team
We are delighted that Anne and Carina have recently been awarded a small follow-on grant from the Royal Holloway Centre for Geohumanities as part of their The Creating Earth Futures Commissions 2018.
The project is titled ‘Mapping the Sound: charting deep time through new lenses’ and here is a brief synopsis:
This project aims to create ‘cultural maps’ from a section of the coastline of Orkney using existing datasets and archives, and new materials gathered through the AHRC funded project ‘Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time’. The cultural maps will develop as three creative interpretations. First, working with traditional and contemporary printing techniques including using an antique Columbian Press that was used to publish books of poetry by local authors including Robert Rendall & George Mackay Brown. Second, by generating digital and online interactive maps; and third, the use of sonification and creative mapping techniques to represent and integrate large geological, climatic and social datasets. We will draw on a series of collaborative exercises and stimuli from the project participants including guided walks, sonification scores, drawing, photography, video and sculpture, to tell the story and narratives involved in the changing landscape of the West Shore in Orkney, whilst exploring the role of creative tactics of visualization/sonification to present environmental data to different publics. By layering and building multi-disciplinary and multi-media interpretations and expressions, this project explores the aesthetic dimensions of traditional earth science fieldwork mapping practices, drawing out how this provides opportunities for a form of sensory fieldwork that combines creative/critical methods to produce an ‘eco-biography’ of site.
You can read more on this exciting commision from Royal Holloway, along with the other successful projects on the web link: http://geohumanitiesforum.org/news-announcing-the-creating-earth-futures-commissions-2018/.
Carina will be returning to Orkney to work with Anne and Richard (who is based in Rousay this year) during two separate trips:
- 24th April – 1st May
- 5th June – 13th June
We aim to expand our research on the West Shore and Hoy Sound, developing some of the work from last year’s ‘Walking the Sound’ and also to integrate the work of others to generate new ‘cultural maps’. Ultimately we would like to produce something that could be used as a community resource.
We hope to see you all the good folk who supported us in Orkney very soon and in the meantime, we hope you read our piece on The Conversation ‘A glass of whisky could help you get your head around deep time’: http://theconversation.com/a-glass-of-whisky-could-help-you-get-your-head-around-deep-time-79240.
Plenty of new blogs will be on the horizon – so keep watching this space!