Somerset House Studios

Associate Artist Jennifer Walshe presents her project Aisteach, the fictional Avant-Garde Archive of Ireland. Recorded during the 2018 edition of Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam where Walche was performing and screening the film An Gléacht alongside Mario de Vega.Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde is a fictional history of the musical avant-garde in Ireland which spans 187 years, and is housed at aisteach.org, the website of the Aisteach Foundation, a fictional organisation which purports to be ”The Avant-Garde Archive of Ireland.” For the project, Walshe engaged a huge team of collaborators and created compositions, recordings, scores, articles and ephemera.An Gléacht Outsider artist Caoimhín Breathnach (1934–2009) lived as a recluse in the Irish village of Knockvicar for all of his life. Breathnach’s artistic practice focussed on the creation of ‘subliminal’ tapes and films, which he believed possessed the capacity to shift consciousness. In these works, Ogham magickal scales, crystallography, astronomy, folklore, and natural phenomena are combined with found audio and visual material to produce an idiosyncratic and esoteric system of correspondences. Breathnach spent the last years of his life planning a film called An Gléacht. The work was to combine subliminal tapes and films with filmed footage showing a sequence of occult rituals at sites in Ireland ranging from the Hellmouth door in the Caves of Kesh to the Tobernalt holy well. In 2015, the Cork Film Festival commissioned Jennifer Walshe – Breathnach’s great-niece – to complete An Gléacht. The film has been shown worldwide with live musical accompaniment from musicians, including Okkyung Lee, David Grubbs, Toshimaru Nakamura, Martin Taxt, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Heenan, Tomomi Adachi and more.

Studios artist Marija Bozinovska Jones and musician and artist J.G. Biberkopf introduce a collaborative new work entitled Fascia 171208180222. The live audio-visual performance positions the contemporary self entangled in surveillance economies with data as an elusive currency. The interview was recorded at this year's Sonic Acts Academy in Amsterdam where the work was premiered. Marija Bozinovska Jones’ work revolves around formation of identity within augmented technocapitalism. She examines implications of new technologies and how society adapts to them, contemplating coping mechanisms. Via MBJ Wetware as a hybrid identity, Marija initiates collaborative live performances, simulating immersive heterotopian landscapes to be collectively inhabited. Her festival performances include commissions for CTM/ Deutschlandradio Kultur, a performance at Vorspiel and presentations at Transmediale and MIRA/Scope Sessions. Her past musical collaborators include JG Biberkopf, Iydes, A Guy Called Gerald and Mind:Body:Fitness/Phoebe Kiddo, among others. Virtual voice assistant: MBJ Wetware Music and sound design: J.G. Biberkopf

Snooker is the most intensely psychological sport. A one-on-one battle of nerves, where the course of history can be determined by a single ball, potted or missed. Many assume the sport to be slow and repetitive. But behind the bowties and waistcoats lurks turbulence and controversial characters. Snooker is a game of contradictions and juxtapositions like no other. In general the game rewards consistency and risk aversion. However, it is rife with individuals who go against the grain. In this podcast Studios resident, member of Common Study, film-maker and snooker player, Louis-Jack, discusses his latest work in progress. Hurricane looks back at the tumultuous life of Alex Higgins, one of the sports most loved and controversial characters, through the lens of the modern understandings of mental Health. Louis-Jack explores the psychological aspects of snooker and suggests that a consideration of this can support people generally with mental health in daily life. The interview was recorded in the Snooker Rooms of Somerset House Studios. Podcast produced by Jo Barratt for Somerset House Studios.

Eloise Hawser presents Anabasis to Dora, a programme of multi-site visits based on research into unusual and contested spaces, museums and collections around the UK. The series formed the background to her current exhibition By the deep, by the mark at Somerset House, until 22 April.The podcast follows Eloise on an Anabasis to Dora tour exploring London’s infrastructure with a bus trip to Beckton sewage treatment works and Crossness via Thamesmead. These waste disposal and transport sites form the functional backbone of the city, interconnected by largely unseen subterranean systems, moving fluids, waste and data around in a constant, necessary flow.Beckton marks the confluence of London’s northern and southern outfall sewers. The 260-acre site has been home to a treatment works for a century, and displays a rare array of different architectural tropes in its myriad buildings and structures. It also plays host to wildlife, a collection of Brutalist incinerators, a cylindrical pond, and all with an unexpectedly agrarian look to it. Crossness, a now out-of-use Victorian sewage pumping station, fronted by ornate, almost church-like nineteenth century ironwork, a sunken void at the back hinting at its less attractive function. Crossness – adorned in ornate, richly painted ironwork – has been dubbed a ‘cathedral on the marsh’. It is both an expression of grand nineteenth-century ambition and a fundamentally utilitarian structure serving the most unglamorous necessities of a human population.Podcast produced by Somerset House Studios, edited by Jo Barratt. Music: Cylinder Nine by Chris Zabriskie, Global Warming by Kai Engel

Somerset House Studio’s resident Beatrice Dillon presents Taut Line, a multi-channel sound installation co-commissioned in partnership with Abandon Normal Devices. The piece premiered at The Great Cave, Peak Cavern Derbyshire in September as part of the AND 2017 festival programme.At Somerset House, Dillon reconfigured the work for The Deadhouse, a rarely accessible underground tunnel running beneath the courtyard, clad with headstones dating from the 1600s, the remnants of a chapel that was formally located on the site.Image: Anne TetzlaffPodcast produced by Jo Barratt for Somerset House Studios.