Artists’ Audio, Interactive and Performance (E)

12noon to 2pm – The Garden by Mary Tallontire
Originally commissioned by Waterside Arts for Prism Festival 2025, The Garden was an interactive, immersive installation, now being presented on one screen as an interactive film.

Inspired by solar punk, science fiction and optimistic visions of a sustainable future, this ever changing, speculative world reacts to the collective decisions of audience members, who interact through a web browser on their phones, allowing visitors to collectively influence the virtual weather. This causes solar energy or rainwater to accumulate, which is used to power lights, sprinklers and other objects within the digital space, creating continuous change within the environment.

The Garden encourages people to explore new worlds and imagining hopeful futures, immersing the audience into a place of optimism away from climate anxiety. It is a solar punk experience: an anti-dystopian, anti-capitalist piece that looks practically at creating a sustainable future, optimistically imagining a world where we have overcome climate change. It’s not about ignoring the problem but instead thinking about solutions and ways that we can coexist with the planet and each other, encouraging hope in this age of climate anxiety. Despite this serious tone, The Garden is a playful space, allowing people to experiment, be curious and learn through doing, whilst also being a meditative, audio-visual experience. So…. immerse yourself in and connect with this place of optimism.

2pm to 4pm – Welter by Victoria Gray & Sam Williams
Welter is an artists’ moving image work, made by Victoria Gray & Sam Williams. The work explores Victoria’s embodied psycho-sensory experience of being autistic, as well as the interoceptive experience of dissociation and complex PTSD.

The film is an attempt to communicate the invisible, phenomenological dimension of Victoria’s experience of neurodivergence, in order to demonstrate the rich kinaesthetic and psychic intelligences that spring from that inner world.

4pm to 6pm – Listening with Gair Wood by Alex De Little
Alex De Little is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. His practice pursues listening as a process of attuning and relating across human and more than human domains, producing installations, live works, workshops, and long-form streams that engage specific sites and contexts, from woodland environments to hospital emergency departments. He often works through extended collaborations with ecologists, architects, healthcare practitioners and community partners, mobilising listening to register environmental change, institutional conditions or community organisation. His work has been presented internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Royal Academy and East Java Biennale. Alex is a Lecturer in Creative Practice at the University of Leeds and a certified Deep Listening practitioner.

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Even though this is a free drop in event, it is helpful if you could reserve a space to help us know expected numbers. Audiences are welcome to attend at any time and stay for as long or as little as you wish.