Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive was a painting and sound exhibition in the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Richmond. NPL is the UK’s national standards laboratory for metrology and is one of the world’s leading measurement institutes. The exhibition took the form of installations consisting of paintings and soundscapes set up in two spaces, an anechoic chamber (dead) and a reverberation chamber (alive). For the exhibition a new body of work was made including a twenty-seven-metre panoramic painting, fourteen paintings (thirty-by-thirty-centimetres) and two surround soundscapes. The exhibition spanned these two rooms, the first one being a five-sided reverberation room, with a decay time of over ten seconds, the second room being a six-metre cube hemi-anechoic room with background sound levels being close to zero decibels. Entering the first space the viewer was encircled with a large panorama accompanied by a relentless montage of environmental noise. In the second space there was a much greater temporal separation of the sounds and the images were in the form of small paintings placed sporadically around the wedge-lined walls. The soundscapes were made up from field recordings, mainly of traffic noise, edited to produce surround sound in 5.1 configurations. The raw sounds were mostly recorded in Glasgow, where the motorway passes directly through the centre, and the visual imagery related to the same traffic, motorways and urban city sprawls This was with support from Mike Goldsmith and Richard Barham from NPL. Accompanying the exhibition were a series of educational events including science of art public event and talk