Thursday 11 November, 2010

Advance bookings for this event have closed. Tickets are still available and can be puchased from the Information Desk on the day.

Concessions and members are kindly asked to show proof or ID when collecting tickets on the night.

The series that showcases the best of new British work presents the London premiere of a new project by Paul Rooney, Thin Air (Sited sound work for a lecture theatre, with surround sound and projected images. Accompanying book. 60 mins. 2009)

Part academic lecture, part science fiction story, ‘Thin Air’ highlights the legacy and little known research of 1970s Leeds Polytechnic student Alan Smithson. Smithson claimed that ‘voices’ he had recorded in the Polytechnic's H Building were sonic manifestations of memories that had been somehow preserved in the electromagnetic ether of its rooms through a process which he called ‘site-anamnesis’. Smithson also asserted that the particularly radical and eventful – and, ultimately, tragic – history of the building had contributed to its facility for preserving and recalling the charged moments of remembrance. Combining information culled from conversations, archives, poems, songs, press cuttings and Smithson’s own extensive journals and tape recordings, Rooney and his collaborator, Belgian architectural historian Dr Annette Gomperts, decipher a myriad of correspondences between historical moments in the life of individual students, the H Building, and the wider world.
‘Thin Air’ was originally commissioned by Leeds Metropolitan University, Sound and Music and MAAP.

Presented in association with LUX

Image courtesy: Ron Crowcroft.

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