Plugholes
Plugholes is an interactive audio installation created as part of my Winter Artist Residency (February-March 2025) at the Pervasive Media Studio in Watershed, Bristol, UK.
The plughole you have unsuspectingly discovered is speaking to you: a series of truisms and thoughts that you may or may not agree with.
Thankfully, you can trigger the sensor on the tap and drown out the voice.
Director: Jon Aitken / Footage: Jack Offord
During the residency, on the theme of Actual Reality, I explored ways to put ideas and stories, big and small, out into the world as layers, along with all the other narratives that we live amongst, without the medium getting in the way.
I’m interested in building non-linear story spaces: small, distributed moments that you can experience in any order to build a picture of a place/time.
This work aims to create opportunities to encounter curious, thoughtful or playful moments that altogether form a layer of fictions that sit alongside us: weird little houses for ideas.
There are some mid-way blogs about the work here and here.
Here’s the residency showcase discussion and Q&A at Watershed with fellow Winter Residency Artist Nat Whitney and Studio Community Lead, Martin O’Leary.
I’m indescribably grateful to everyone at the Pervasive Media Studio for being so welcoming and generous with their time and expertise. The culture of “generous interruptability” makes it a real and unique utopia.
I’m especially grateful to Victoria Tillotson and Martin O’Leary, who were supportive and enthusiastic through all of my frustrating vagueness and potentially disastrous plumbing requests, and Tarim, who knows things and the worth of things.
I’m working on ways to get back there as soon as possible.
The Winter Artist Residency is made possible by My World Creates and Arts Council England.