We are delighted to present the first collaboration between Darren Joyce, George Saxon and Justin Wiggan. 

Drawing on their recent groundbreaking projects with the health sector, the artists present new research exploring empathy, nostalgia and recall through audio, performance and film. Their individual contributions will clash, coexist and repel each other. 

Justin Wiggan will explore the portrayal of nostalgia drawing from the empathy tests used to tell humans from androids in Philip K Dick’s cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the cultural phenomenon of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) – the pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli; and Harsh Noise Wall – in which artists produce unchanging, monolithic “walls” of static noise.

George Saxon presents BREATHING TEST: Dying Melody, a new work focused on breathing (inhalations and exhalations), and the limitations caused by childhood respiratory illness and auto-immune weakness. Through live performance, archived video recordings, visual and audio soundscapes, Saxon will explore illness and its manifestations, highlighting the liminal gap between memory, recall and nostalgia.

D Joyce, using binaural recordings (holographic 3D sound), will explore schizoaffective disorder – a brain disorder in which sufferers experience two vastly different worlds within one consciousness. Schizoaffective disorder is to experience both the world that non-sufferers perceive, but also a complex world riddled with auditory hallucinations and mood swings. Joyce invites the audience to listen to holographic sound in realtime through the medium of headphones and experience what it’s like to live in an audible parallel reality.

Programme of events:

Friday 02 October | 6-8pm
Joyce, Saxon and Wiggan present a live event for Digbeth First Friday

Saturday 03 October | 3-4pm
Join the artists as they discuss their collaboration and wider practices.

This event is presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.