CHELSEA WORKSHOPS

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(written as part-submission to a call-for-entries, discussing the audio track Clicker Closer Maker Finisher)

This study is part of an open-ended enquiry into the representation of place as sound, in particular within Northampton. The work attempts to communicate a past and present view of a once dominant boot and shoe industry by evoking sonic images of a workforce that shaped the town in terms of its contributions to the UK (the armed forces, fashion, industry) and further afield. These sonic interpretations of people, objects, and spaces were projected into the main production area of a disused Northampton victorian boot and shoe factory, allowing the architecture of the building to shape and add to the sounds through reflection, reverberations etc, leading to a hybrid portrait of a past industry and a physical environment in which it occurred.

The boot and shoe industry (becoming the specialist industry of Northampton in the mid 17th Century) led to the construction of hundreds of homes in the town centre and employed two fifths of the towns men at the end of the 19th Century. The rise of the mechanical age within the industry at this time led to a steady decline in the workforce, with makers gradually moving to machine processes and outsourcing work to cut costs. The chosen site for this work was perhaps the most recent example of a move away from tradition and past practices, with the previous tenants now making footwear in a purpose-built, fully mechanised site outside of the town. This work attempts to capture the final moments of these factories at a point in time where all except a few are being converted into luxury, open-plan apartment blocks.

Digital translation of image and text to sound took place through various algorithmic processes, using open source and cutsom-build software to reduce visual and written information to a raw data that can be reformed as sound waves.

4 areas of the shoe-making production process (clicking, closing, making and finishing) were projected by separate loudspeakers, positioned accurately in areas of the factory where these processes took place. Despite the seemingly atonal quality of the sound, the track is a kind of spatial narrative, with hundreds of sonically different and abstracted artefacts of past workers and their actions being manipulated and moved around in space by the architecture of the building over the course of several hours, forming a temporal account of industry and place at the point of recording.

Study for Clicker Closer Maker Finisher:

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