Sensible Acivities

Sensible Activities is a project translating mediated ways of seeing and hearing - informed by the ubiquitous presence of screens, speakers, and edited media in our day to day lives - into environments one step removed from digital technology. Beginning life as a published collection of experimental sensory exercises, Sensible Activities now manifests as participatory events for small audience groups; active excursions into environments away from, or in unstable relationships with digital technologies and infrastructures. ​Sensible Activities takes the form of guided participatory (usually) night-time excursions into the outdoors to realise a series of composed sensory experiments designed for hyper-specific locations and contexts, and often involving local collaborators (past iterations have included local musicians, performers, seaweed harvesters, tailors, boat captains, and tour guides). I think of this as a kind of “Radical Colloquialism”. ​ A key part of the project also involves exploring and using local foliage as musical instruments; developing electronic, or synthetic-sounding techniques from the most ubiquitous, modest, and sustainable natural materials. Excursions like these are not bound up like galleries, theatres, and concert halls with codes and rules of behaviour. Time functions differently away from Acts and Intervals in favour of more unpredictable and unquantifiable forces; the length of a day, the fork in the road, the serendipitous encounter, the turn in the weather, the cold, the humidity, hunger, thirst. Sensible Activities is appropriately open to these forces in all their slippery, dreamlike character.