photo Tanya Coulson

A hay field at midnight – midsummer – in Oxfordshire at the festival Supernormal 2017

People gathered at the Octopolis venue – a bird hide – part of the outside secret woodland cinema curated by BEEF for Supernormal17.
https://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/programme

Nearly a hundred people turned up to experience the work walking in single file along a narrow path through a hay field in the moonlight.

Speaker carriers, there were six of them, were dispersed along the line of walkers. Every so often the line stopped and people listened while people’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

Please use head phones to listen

This is one of the tracks used in the walk. The sources of sound are all received from outside our earth’s atmosphere emanating from stars – pulsars at different distances and our own sun.

At the end of the field the line of promenaders followed the lead walker back along the path they’d just walked. Like a sedentary dance the outward walkers passed the returning walkers along the line, and their sounds crossed creating another version of the star sounds to listen to.

The quality of the summer air, the night sounds, the recorded star sounds and the clouds revealing the moon, prompted one of the walkers to say that it had made the experience of the vastness ‘above’ more vivid.

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