Seven Sites: Experiencing the unexpected

At the start of June, a number of conversations took place between strangers over lunch in Kabana, one of several bustling curry cafes in the back streets of the Northern Quarter. Nothing unusual about that – except that each diner had no knowledge of the person they would be sharing the next half hour with. The 'date' was an actor from Salford's Quarantine Theatre Company, and the conversation topics were chosen from a menu of 'starters', 'mains' and 'desserts' (graded either 'regular' or 'spicy'), at times predictably banal and at times unexpectedly frank. The encounters were both lighthearted and cathartic, like a public confession box for the hopes and fears, ideas and experiences which go unvoiced and unheard on a day to day basis, raising questions about how much we are prepared to reveal to strangers, what we will talk about if we know it will go no further, what constitutes intimacy, what it really means to have a 'local' – and why we don't talk to each other more often.

The lunch dates were the final instalment in a series of events, performances and installations that have taken over seven non-art sites across Manchester and Salford since last August. Edwina Ashton hosted a fantastical tea party in a Salford tower block, and local artist Amber Sanchez took performance to the streets of a Salford estate. Imagined narratives were constructed around hotel guests and recounted by Giles Bailey to a small audience in a darkened hotel room, and a radio programme broadcast a new monument for Salford, which existed only as a composite compiled from Amy Feneck's survey of local residents' ideas.

Seven Sites was a collaboration between curator Laura Mansfield, who is interested in artist-led activity, and artist Swen Steinhauser, who has a background in contemporary devised theatre. Swen explained: “Visual arts in general has a fear of theatre. The two disciplines seem quite divided so we thought we should work on bringing them together.” For Swen, Seven Sites was a chance to be on the other side of art production – working on making it happen for artists, and for both it was a way of trying out durational programming – although, as Laura explains, the project has evolved: “It's become something really different and the rhythm has shifted with each piece. We were interested in doing something that's always shifting but still manages to be a programme.”

The pair chose seven places of everyday public interaction, from the Lowry Outlet Mall to an outdated church cafeteria and the overwrought but shabby grandeur of the Britannia Hotel – a task that was harder than first thought, due to bureaucratic hurdles raised by insurance, security and noise. Seven artists (or groups) were invited to each produce a response to a site, primarily those who had not worked in Manchester before and who “weren't so easy to pinpoint and could work in more than one place”.

By presenting art and performance in places where neither are typically encountered, Seven Sites aimed to subvert the genre expectations of both audiences – at the same time as incorporating the preexisting users of these places, and those who were merely passing through. Laura explained: “I felt frustrated with being part of a certain community, and all the announcements of cuts presented an opportunity to do something outside of fixed spaces. The minute you fix something to a place you always get an expectation of a fixed audience. If you shift spaces you get a diverse audience. Two audiences meet with the general public in a place that's not their own.” Swen added: “ If you frame something it really alters your experience of something that's already there. Certain institutions are associated with a certain aesthetic. A gallery is such a safe environment. We wanted to take audiences away from a safe environment and bring people in to see work they wouldn't normally have seen.” Each instalment existed both on its own and as part of a series. Swen explained: “A single site is dependent on whoever comes and it is difficult to get a big audience outside of a tested institution. A series is less dependent on one occurrence of a big crowd. There was very little continuity of audience. Some people came to one or two but still got a sense of it as a series.”

Seven Sites required the audience to take a leap of faith, with each event advertised only with the barest of information – date, time, artist and location, its exact form remaining a secret until it took place. Laura admits: “Some of the audience thought it was some kind of city tour!” It was also a chance for artists to try something outside their usual practice, and for the curators to step back and be surprised, with the shape of the final work left up to the artist. Laura said: “Your expectations of who that artist could be were changed.” Speaking of Antonia Low, who transformed a serving hatch in a church into an idealised but unattainable white cube space, Laura said: “Antonia really put a spin on her own practice and did the opposite of what she usually does.” One of the most daring of the interventions took place during a regular pub comedy night where, unbeknown to the crowd, Seven Sites presented the comedy debut of Sian Robinson Davies – as Laura says, “She didn't have to worry about anyone coming!” Sian didn't want to be seen as an artist but as another comedian – and her awkward yet funny performance was well-received by regulars who didn't realise they were involved in an art performance. Sian now plans to do another comedy performance, in London.

Seven Sites was a reminder of the fantastical that can be found in the banal, the possibilities in the conversations that usually go unsaid, the potential for places to be transformed with a bit of imagination, and what you might find if you step outside your local and give new things a go.

Photos taken from the Seven Sites tumblr.


Laura Mansfield has curated the exhibition Triptych, which will run from 13-16 July at Three Piccadilly Place.

Tune into architecture: LoneLady's The Utilitarian Poetic/Manchester's Modernist Heroines walking tour to be repeated

As Love Architecture festival celebrates buildings great and good, one installation is reminding us of an equally important part of the built environment which tends to attract less excitement – the infrastructure all around us, that gets us from A to B.

The Utilitarian Poetic makes a new song by Warp Records' LoneLady, resident in one of the nearby housing blocks that is surrounded physically and aurally by the the hum of the car, available to anyone who plugs their headphones into a temporary socket cemented into a slip road where the Mancunian Way curves down towards the ground. The work inhabits a barren, leftover landscape – battered flowers and trees grow out of an undulating floor of rocks, discarded sweet wrappers and broken glass – where one isn't inclined to stop. It's demarcated only by a lavender graffiti tag, one among several impermanent scrawls. The song, 'Good Morning, Midnight', loops metallic percussion, distant echoes and fade-outs over bassy undertones, constantly on the move; even its rhythmic bleeping could be there to guide you across the next road. The hiss of the traffic continues in the background, audible over the headphones, as cars charge past, cyclists puff and pedestrians scurry home.

As I stand, a lone listener plugged into a wall for five minutes, no-one stops to ask me what I'm doing, or comes to have to go. They're all plugged into thoughts and sounds of their own. But it made me think: if our roads are part of the physical, utilitarian infrastructure, then music and dancing are part of a cultural infrastructure that's no less necessary; an unofficial, after hours route to escape where dreams are dreamed, connections are made, friendships are forged and networks come and go.

A pamphlet on The Utilitarian Poetic, including a location map, can be purchased for £1 from Manchester Modernist Society's pop-up shop in the Royal Exchange until Sunday June 24, 1pm-8.30pm. The installation runs for the same period (or as long as the life of the battery!).

In other news, the Manchester's Modernist Heroines walking tour, an outcome of a joint project between the Shrieking Violet, Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement, will be repeated on Thursday June 21 as part of the Love Architecture festival.

Antonia Low: White Cube Longing, Chapel Street & Hope United Reformed Church

Berlin-based artist Antonia Low's work exposes what she sees as the 'impossibility of the white cube', a supposedly neutral place in which the visitor forgets their surroundings to concentrate on what is in the space, rather than the context in which it is displayed. In the past, she has used white cubes as starting points for installations that show up inevitable imperfections, exposing the infrastructure – a lift mechanism or wiring – hidden behind surfaces that are seemingly free of detail.

For White Cube Longing, Low has created a single focal point in a room where once there was none. The basement space in which White Cube Longing is displayed in Salford's Chapel Street and Hope United Reformed Church has numerous distractions relating to its multiple uses, from a netball basket to balloons hanging from the ceiling to a girls' brigade logo. White Cube Longing is a pristine white room, viewed from a serving hatch, that is cut off from the rest of the space (and now, due to the false walls and floor of the installation, only accessible via the serving hatch). Illuminated in neon, the room looks almost surgically clean and new, appearing to stand independently of time and space, yet the installation was only made possible because of the space's obsolescence as a kitchen for preparing and serving food. The kitchen did not meet hygiene standards because the lack of a dishwasher meant cups could not be washed at the required temperature for public use. Eventually the kitchen will be refurbished, but until then the church's minister is content to let the installation remain as a 'step in the middle, a quiet space'.

Low's installation draws you in, a glowing light among the basement's gloom. It also draws you into an institution which is in need of an attraction and a new purpose to get people through its doors. Once, churches were focal points for the community – places for routine and regularity, physical reminders among the rooftops of a common, unifying belief. Because of their scale, it's hard not to feel a sense of awed reverence and smallness in a church. As congregations dwindle, and ageing churchgoers are not replaced by younger generations, churches are shutting down and the buildings are left to face dereliction. Many are magnificent, but it's hard to find a new use for buildings so crafted and specific in their original intent and expensive to maintain.

White cube galleries have been accused of imbuing artworks with an air of sacredness, or imposing a formal distance between the exhibition and the viewer. The one object on display in White Cube Longing is a cupboard, the oldest of several which had been added to the kitchen over the years as the building's use evolved. The lack of activity in White Cube Longing makes you notice the varied life of the rest of the building, a place associated not just with worship but the diverse people who use it for non-religious purposes. The basement of the United Reformed Church is usually accessed through a separate, back entrance, but the curators and artist made the decision to bring visitors to White Cube Longing in through the main church itself, and past a new cafe area which has replaced the one in the basement. Low's installation makes you ponder the building's adaptability and wonder what these places are for now, which have been around for so long, and what is lost if they disappear.

White Cube Longing is the sixth in a series of performances, installations and interventions into the everyday around Manchester and Salford that comprise the Seven Sites project.

Visit White Cube Longing at Chapel Street & Hope United Reformed Church, Lamb Court, Chapel Street, Salford, M3 7AA daily from 11am-4pm until March 30.

The strange stories of sounds — Kinokophone at MadLab

Last Thursday I spent the evening in the Northern Quarter immersed in strange sounds and unusual storytelling. 'Kinokologue 1: Sound spore', a temporary sound art installation in the exhibition space at MadLab, was the culmination of a Cornerhouse/Paul Hamlyn Foundation Micro Commission, followed by Kinokophonography upstairs, a regular listening event which showcases sounds sent in from all over the world.

'Kinokologue 1: Sound Spores' was an interactive collection of sound specimens arranged as 'spores' embedded in different objects. Spores were tucked in drawers and filed neatly in a cabinet ready to be opened, or presented as threaded images, interpreted by embroidery artist Akiko Yanagimoto, framed in glass as if in a collaged scene. At the same time as vintage objects were reused and reinvented as listening posts, everyday sounds plucked from their context took on a new meaning as part of a growing sound archive. Listeners were invited to borrow headphones, wander round and get ready to listen closely, then help classify sounds by suggesting categories or turning dials to bring sounds together into compositions and writing down instructions based on successful combinations for future visitors. Although samples included recognisable sounds and even those we might conventionally call music — the meandering of a violin, piercing whistles — the most exciting sounds to explore were those that did not have an obvious source. Burbling water and crunching leaves are atmospheric, but more elusive sounds such as faint 'put-putting' or vaguely familiar scraping are the most interesting as, rather than placing you directly in a scene in your head, they make you listen again and again to try to remember back to the situation in which you've heard them before (if at all).

The origins of the word 'kinokophone' are drawn from both cinema ('kino') and sound ('phone'), and it's easy to build a mental story around each spore. Some sounds stand on their own

— such as the simple, repeated onomatopoeia of the Japanese word 'nyokinyoki', but the recordings presented on the night were not heard in isolation. Contributors either introduced their recording in person or sent a description and context for their sounds, whether a reminiscence about a visit to the dentist that brought about a recording of a dentist's drill and suction — "my pain is your listening pleasure", an anecdote about the conditions in which the recording was taken — conjuring up the exposed, windswept discomfort of hanging around on the side of the mountain to record a pile of rocks, or more technical descriptions about how the sound was achieved — as in 'Growth of reverb', a recording taking advantage of the effects of footsteps on the acoustics of a stairwell at the University of Manchester, a place that was well known to some of the audience. Even those recordings that feature the presence of people are disorientating once stripped of their context: you wouldn't have guessed the setting for a conversation between young people unless told it took place at a goth festival in Whitby.

Sitting in a room of neatly arranged rows of chairs listening to recordings might seem like a strange concept for an evening, but the host described it as a way to "find out about the world by listening to what's around". Whilst my expectations of what an ice berg in Australia would sound like (sparse, barren, windswept) were confounded (it actually sounded bubbling, watery and alive), the recording of a busy, noisy, early morning in Mombasa sounded as if it could have been taken from any urban dwelling or office block with the window open on a summer's day. Recordings such as the Amazon rainforest, taken from the British Library, with its variety of sounds and array of natural wonders (including a bird whose recurring call descended a scale in a way that was almost comical and another bird whose insistent brilling made you wonder if it was the inspiration for the telephone's ring), and an amazingly evocative amplification of tree roots creaking in the wind like groaning wooden furniture, achieved in Lithuania using contact mikes, were beautifully observed. However, my favourite recording was of a sound so ordinary you would not normally think to stop to listen to it. A recording of the shaking of a tin roof on the Manchester University students' union, caused to move by the reverberations of the bass and drums-dominated practise session of a heavy metal band, couldn't help but make me smile.

Find out more about the work of the Kinokophone collective at www.kinokophone.com.

Folkestone Triennial: A Million Miles from Home

Once, Folkestone was a destination. Authors from Charles Dickens to Agatha Christie found inspiration in the town and so popular was it with those with money and leisure that a bar in the Grand Hotel is named after Mrs Keppels, the mistress of once frequent visitor Edward VII. It's hard to imagine its glory days now. Like so many other seaside towns, which fell out of favour in the era of cheap overseas holidays, it's enjoyed better times. The opening of the Channel Tunnel saw off ferries to France and even the Orient Express, which until recently passed through Folkestone on its way to the continent, has ceased to stop at the harbour station. In the past few years, a new (extremely ugly) shopping centre has been built in an attempt to revitalise the declining town centre, and the Folkestone Triennial initiated, aiming to reinvigorate the town culturally.

The first festival, in 2008, installed works by leading artists in prominent places around the town, inspired by both Folkestone's heritage and the cultural baggage of seaside towns – from teen pregnancy to pigeons. Some of the artworks have become permanent, and settled into the fabric of the town – Richard Wentworth's plaques denoting non-native tree species, Tracy Emin's casts of discarded children's items, Mark Wallinger's cliff-top pebbles commemorating the lives of local men lost in the first world war and Richard Wilson's beach huts, refashioned from a former crazy golf course. The second Folkestone Triennial builds on the first, with international artists opening up the town's hidden, deserted and overlooked places (whether through dereliction, decline or obsolescence), from lowly back rooms and storage spaces to a grand Masonic Hall. I went to secondary school in Folkestone, and the Triennial is not just an art treasure hunt, challenging you to find works scattered about the town, but an alternative guidebook, taking you from the West End to the East Cliff and giving a new perspective on the sights in between.

One space usually unseen by the public is a dank, dark deckchair store underneath the cliff-top Leas promenade, where French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira's films play on mismatched video screens around the room in an effective, immersive installation. Her films document two Algerian lighthouses and the sometimes isolated lives experienced by those who work in them. Tucked away in a corner of the south east, Folkestone isn't really on the way to anywhere except France and, watching Sedira's films in a space cut into the cliff, it feels like you're detached from the rest of the world, on an island even, protected from the waves that crash against the rocks on screen. It's hard to forget that Calais is 30 miles from Folkestone – less than half the distance to London, and a number of works dwell on themes of immigration, displacement and cultural alienation. These include a floor of office space in the high street given over to an installation by Israeli artist Smadar Dreyfus, where visitors stumble around different rooms, filled with the sounds of children's classrooms. The total darkness and unfamiliarity mean it's completely disorientating.

Right at the Western end of the Leas is what looks, if you notice it at all, like an unusually large piece of topiary. Hidden below a gently swaying mass of leaves is a Martello tower, one of many solid, round structures that were built to defend the coast against Napoleonic attack. They still stand along the Kent coast in various states of repair, from crumbled ruins to now-desirable house conversions. This Martello tower is so deserted it has gone beyond a ruin to a jungle, and Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias has cut a wavy path up to it through the undergrowth. With leaves above your head, and the foliage multiplied by mirrors and castings of branches, it's like you're walking into a hedge. You emerge into a viewing platform, separated from the Martello tower by a living moat of brambles and nettles, to admire the tower. It might be hidden, but it's still standing after centuries in front of the ancient Kent hills.

The tower's nearest neighbours are mansions overlooking the sea set in spacious, sun-catching grounds. On the same stretch, and slightly further towards the town, is the massive Grand Hotel. With vintage open-top Jaguars parked outside and afternoon tea served to live music on a grand piano, it's one of the few places where it's possible to imagine how glamorous Folkestone would once have been. Yet Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad leads you through the vast, spacious rooms with plush carpets and elaborate wallpaper to a plain back-room with floorboards and old furniture – a part of the hotel that isn't normally seen by visitors. It houses a giant scratchcard which visitors are invited to scrape to reveal images of seaside festivals, from Brazilian carnivals to Folkestone's annual Charivari parade. Auad has also placed work in another sometimes hidden space, down at the harbour – low tide reveals Carrancas, carved figureheads inspired by Brazilian good-luck talismans, attached to poles amongst the boats that have come to rest on the (usually submerged) harbour mud.

At the nearby Harbour station, the train tracks snake right out into the sea on a pier for trains to be loaded onto boats. A sculpture by Paloma Varga Weisz has landed on the tracks, on top of what could be a magic carpet – only it's been grounded and Folkestone's its final destination. The figures on the rug are going nowhere, and neither is anyone else – the station was closed in 2009. The station and pier are decrepit, but have spectacular views over the sea to the White Cliffs of Dover, where cross-channel traffic continues.

By the sea a bell, removed from a church because it no longer fits the tuning of the other bells, is suspended over wasteland, waiting for passers-by to ring it. The surrounding area is also in suspense – once home to the Rotunda fun fair, source of memories of childhood birthday parties and, when we were older, Friday night trips to the rides, it was cleared for redevelopment (a supermarket, casino, leisure complex and housing were all suggested for the site), before the recession and a tussle over opposing plans for the land put development on hold.

The other side of the Harbour, at Sunny Sands, the town's sandy beach, I was sceptical about seeing Cornelia Parker's mermaid sculpture, thinking I wouldn't find much of interest in a sculpture copied from an iconic artwork so associated with another place. In real life though the figure, cast from a local woman, is rather lovely – she stares out to sea, calm and serene on a rock above the crowded chaos of beachgoers with their personal stereos, livid skin and screaming children.

Back up the cliff, in the town, Hew Locke has placed colourfully painted wooden boats on a bright sea of lightbulbs in secluded St Eanswythe's Church. Hanging below the wooden beams of the roof (you realise the nave of the church itself is shaped like an upturned boat), and above antique wooden pews, the boats make you notice the beauty of the friezes and stained glass windows that are already there.

One sign of the town's changing fortunes is the restoration and reopening of the Leas Lift, a Victorian water lift. £1 gets you up or down the cliff – soundtracked by an installation by Martin Creed. I took the Lift up the cliff, and the ascent is matched by a musical composition performed by local string players. It rises like a musical scale, starting off with a low grinding and ending in a high pitch, in a reassuringly smooth transition as the lift stutters and clacks its way towards the Leas.

Other highlights of the festival include Spencer Finch's giant colour wheel and flags, changed daily to match the colour of the sea. Strange Cargo, who have long been doing good projects in the town, complement the Triennial's artworks with plaques drawing your attention to the quirkier aspects of the town's history, drawn from the memories of local people. Perhaps best of all, though, are Ruth Ewan's subtle interventions into the town's timing. She has placed clocks in prominent (and some not so prominent) places in the town, from a pub to a fireplace in the woodlined bar of the Grand Hotel, next to important-looking portraits, to the former town hall and even an entirely new clock on the Leas. The clocks have been changed to French republican time – meaning they only go up to ten, making you do a double take and look again more closely!

It's not often enough you get to be a tourist in your home town. It's three years since I last spent any significant amount of time in the area, but Folkestone's transformation from the place where I grew up has been considerable with new bars, cafes, galleries, independent businesses and venues, and even a University College Folkestone. The Triennial seems to be having a knock-on effect, with its own fringe festival this year – something to explore next time I visit!

Folkestone Triennial is free and runs until September 25.

www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk

Yu-Chen Wang: The Splash and A Last Drop, Victoria Baths

When Yu-Chen Wang first walked into Victoria Baths she was overwhelmed by the space – its size, Edwardian grandeur and industrial-age history. Invited by Future Everything to produce a piece of work in the building, to coincide with the drawing to a close of a three month residency at the Chinese Arts Centre, she decided that, rather than try to fill or change the space she was working with (the former female pool, the smaller of two, now drained, pools that remain in the building), her work would focus on the way the audience experienced the building. She explains: “When I first went I was immediately in love with the space but I found myself very small. My own voice sounded very different. The space itself has already done a lot and there's a lot going on in there so I'm getting people to experience the space differently rather than constructing a lot or displaying a big artwork.”

On the final day of Future Everything, visitors to the Baths will encounter Yu-Chen's work in different spaces around the female pool as part of a sound and performance piece entitled The Splash and A Last Drop which imagines the creation of a machine that produces a last drop of water in Victoria Baths then multiplies it so the water will never dry up again. The work will function as a “moving device”, playing with the transition between different parts of the building.

The story starts at the Chinese Arts Centre, where an actress playing Yu-Chen is filmed boarding a spaceship which transports her to Victoria Baths. Visitors to the Baths will catch-up with the story so far by viewing this video in the former female cloakroom that once served the female pool. A nearby room housing the aerotone – an early, yet still slightly futuristic looking, jacuzzi that, when it was installed at Victoria Baths in 1952, became the first such public facility in the country – will be transformed into an installation of Yu-Chen's highly detailed drawings, which often focus on aspects of machines. When she saw the aeorotone's buttons and controls, Yu-Chen was struck by the feeling “it should be moving, going somewhere”. Yu-Chen's interest in machines is closely connected to her approach to drawing: “Machines are very much about structure and structure is about creating something. Drawing for me is a concept – how bits fit and are connected to each other. It's very much about movement. Machines have a performative element and quality and a human presence and spirit – I always imagine they will start moving and talking. And that's how I would describe what drawing is – it's not just about pencil and paper.” Likewise, The Splash and A Last Drop itself will consist of a number of “components”: “There are lots of bits and pieces put together. The viewer can look at it as a whole or as individual works."

Yu-Chen has been exploring the history of Victoria Baths through its archive, which includes photos, hundreds of memories donated by former users and artefacts relating to its past. Actors playing uniformed ticket officers will regale visitors with stories and hand out publications drawing on industrial heritage, which will act as a programme. The work will culminate with the Cavendish Singers from Didsbury singing a song entitled Songs of the Machine in the female pool, a 1910 poem about machines that start talking to humans that was later set to music by one of its members. Yu-Chen explains: “The space is so big it needs a group. A group of people gives power.” The performance will become a short film that will be screened in Manchester city centre in the days following Future Everything.

The work is a collaboration with writer Bob Dickinson, who Yu-Chen met through her residency, and six MA Media Lab students from Manchester Metropolitan University. She says: “I like to work with people who aren't just artists. The idea goes to writers, film makers, actors, costume makers – it organically develops and becomes a collective idea. It creates different readings – the text levels, the costumes, the actors, the live performance – it is a different way of constructing narrative.”

Visit Yu-Chen Wang's Open Studio at the Chinese Arts Centre, Thomas Street, Manchester from May 11-14.

www.chinese-arts-centre.org

Read more about Yu-Chen's residency on her blog.

The Splash and A Last Drop takes place at Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock on Saturday May 14. The building will be open from 10am-4pm. Free event.

Recreational science and Physical Oscillators: Interview with Antony Hall at Victoria Baths

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentlemen found a new hobby: recreational science. Vicars built their own microscopes. Would-be astronomers went out into their gardens and gazed up at the stars. One man kept a diary in which he wrote detailed observations about the decay of a nut whilst another, a collector, fashioned a bespoke moss jacket lined with pockets for his specimens.

Artist Antony Hall is a like recreational scientist for the twenty first century, inspired by these gentlemen of a certain age and their ability to find “interest in obscure things that weren't immediately exciting” whilst exploring new opportunities such as biohacking and nanotechnology. Often working with slides and Hele-shaw cells, he's interested in “how many different experiments you can do in a slide”.

He explains: “I always wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid – I had a sign on my bedroom saying 'lab', and I loved my microscope, but I wasn't very good at school so was encouraged not to do science. I did art instead and turned it into my science practice.

“I started doing animal sculpture. Then I looked at the natural world and how things are formed and how animals and insects behave. This got me interested in biology and ecology and the conceptual art of the 1970s.”

Antony often works with living creatures such as fish and insects. Pond Life, for example, magnified and projected microorganisms. “I like the element of collaboration with other creatures – of caring and nurturing them and getting them to behave in a certain way by providing them with things that are suitable such as food and light.”

He is a founding member of the Manchester-based Owl Project, a collective that looks at how humans interact with technology, and hacks old technology and turns it into something new, often through sound performances. Part of his practice also involves interactive workshops under the name of Tabletop Experiments. Antony explained: “I've always liked my work to be quite fun, and it makes science accessible.” Sometimes this involves showing participants how to make creations, for example 'brush-bots' – robots made from batteries, brushes and motors which draw spirographs and patterns. He describes them as: “Little units that interact. They've all got their own characters – it's as if they're alive but they're not. They dance around and back into each other. Some go round in circles and others go in straight lines.”

During Future Everything festival, Antony will be creating a “generative soundpiece” in the empty, disused gala pool in Victoria Baths, which members of the public will “walk in and compose”, experiencing invisible fields around motors via electromagnetic sensors akin to microphones that they will be encouraged to pick up and move around the space. Antony's challenge was: “How can I represent movement and liquid in this space that is now just air? How do I represent volume?” He decided the answer was to “energise objects in a big space” by suspending different motors above the pool and adding electricity: “The more energy you put in to it the more chaotic it becomes. The motors affect each other and associate themselves with each other in subtle interactions.”

He elaborated: “I wanted to represent the surface. Visitors will walk into the pool and, instead of walking under water, walk under a layer of activity. When you're beneath it you can hear it buzz above your head.” He admits: “I like going around my garden with a microphone recording the buzzing of bees.”

Inspiration for the installation was drawn from the natural world, in particular a type of beetle known as a whirligig that sits on the surface of the water and has split eyes so it can see above and below. Antony explains that: “Whirligig beetles swarm and “display” to each other. Sometimes they fight, and likewise it sounds really good when the motors clash.”

Antony's interest in capturing movement will be continued with a large wave pendulum made of jam jars hanging in the entrance to the cafe that visitors will set off with their movement as they enter and leave – simulating the continuous motion of a wave.

Antony Hall's Physical Oscillators can be experienced at Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 May from 10am-4pm during Future Everything festival. Free event.