COmmunicating culture

This is an Installation/sound piece

Stepping into a club-like environment, strobe lights and disco ball disrupt your vision. Disjointed sentences repeat and merge together in an overwhelming remix of voices and accents.

It starts with a Scottish accent, almost encouraging you to repeat the phrases, try to copy, try to fit in. The American accent too. These are from sound recordings of my Scottish and American friends trying to teach me their accents (unsuccessfully), I badly repeat what their saying, in both accents and slang. The phonetic spellings are also shown to show the difference in how we pronounce each sentence and vowels.

Visuals are intense, clips of clubs, strobe and digital glitching - breaking down.

The whole experience is intended to represent an overwhelming culture shock and experience of moving to a new place - trying to sound like the people around you, culture and communication.

But listening closely, you can hear the laughter despite frustration as we mimic each others voices, its what makes us unique, and in sharing that, brings us closer together.

BLOG POST

After presenting this work to the student led critique, they seemed to see the meaning in the words they were saying, rather than the pronunciation.

I decided to redo the work in an interactive format, rerecording the sound clips to revolve around each persons accent by asking them where their accent comes from and whether they like it etc.