Image 16

2015

with

John Perivolaris - photography

Ed Welch - text

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Image 16 is a soundscape created as a response and accompaniment to fifteen photographs of Aberdeen taken by John Perivolaris for the exhibition City of Ghosts, itself a response to photographs of Aberdeen taken by George Washington Wilson in the 1850s.

I visited the locations where the fifteen photographs were taken and made audio recordings, being careful to document what I thought John might have seen as well as trying to focus on sonic aspects which might not be detailed in the photograph. The sea is an obvious example of an object which “appears” in both photograph and soundscape, but I was really interested in the sounds that were in my recordings but were absent from John’s images, in particular traffic sounds, which I found were ubiquitous but which are absent from John’s photographs; even the car parks are empty.

The soundscape is delivered over 8 loudspeakers, paired in a number of stereo combinations allowing for the sound to “appear” from different parts of the space. It brings together sounds both seen and unseen, with the occasional ghostly sonic smearing woven in to provide a sixteenth image for the exhibition.