Static

Using collected responses to simple questions, and the voices of the church community, Output Arts have created an audio installation specifically for the GHost III show at St John on Bethnal Green, 2011.

With an old transistor radio, the audience is invited to tune through the static and capture the voices being transmitted throughout the space. In the context of the church, personal memories take on a haunting, ethereal quality.

Invited to participate in GHost III, Output Arts produced an audio piece that invited listeners to consider the way that people can be haunted by a memory or something unsaid.

Output Arts put out a call to friends and supporters to provide personal thoughts and memories. These were collected anonymously via the web by providing the first two or three words of a sentence - such as "my dreams", "her hair", "I almost" - that the participant was then invited to complete. Having gathered hundreds of such sentences, Output Arts asked members of the St John Church community to read a selection for recording.

A continual loop of audio, edited from these recordings, was transmitted within the church and a selection of radios were scattered around for visitors to the show to pick up and listen in. The result was a piece that was revealing, intimate, sometimes funny and often moving.

Output Arts extend their thanks to everyone who contributed text to the piece and are especially grateful to their readers: Amanda, Jim, Pearl, Sabine and Sebastian.