Title: Home Truths (2025)

Format: Audio-visual

Duration: 7’02

 

Home Truths (2025) is a collaborative work between Dr. Mark Pilkington, Thought Universe Studios, Manchester and Dr. Manuella Blackburn, Keele University (England, UK) and is a Reader in Electronic Music and Sound Design.

Visual: The visual is built on audio material derived from interruptions of the communication stream within the domestic setting. Contouring the continuous technical and human interruptions of everyday life. I decided to focus on the symbolic representation of the mouth as a system of communication. The expressive nature of the mouth is an integral part of our body language. The shape of the mouth is a central communicator, even without sound; it can represent emotions by forming gestures to carry emotional association. For example, a smile, snarl, pouting, a kiss, mastication, lip reading, quivering nervousness, a pathway of the breath.  I began collecting close-ups of mouth gestures from my personal film archive of VHS tapes. The video medium questions the mode of representation through image degeneration and digital manipulation of the image. I also made a series of original drawings carefully animated to follow the texture of the sound. Superimposition thickens the texture, while dematerialising the image and object, a plane of expression appears as gesture becomes action. Gradually, points of syncherisis began to form between the sound and image. Trajectories occurred across space and time forming emerging semantic connections.

Audio: Interruptions dominate the audio, acting as pauses, abrupt stops, moments cut short and held breaths. These moments represent the many interruptions experienced in my daily life, in work, activities and composing. Interruptions are temporal states where continuity is ceased but then resumed or returned to after the interrupting event is over. In this work, interruptions are positioned as the main event; acting as focal points and instances to explore the creative potential of these typically unwanted occurrences. There are many different types of interruptions constructed throughout the composition. These show the different outcomes between successful versus unsuccessful interruptions, those that form segues to those that forcefully threaten and break down sound’s continuous presence. This creative experimentation with many interruptions is set within the context of home life and home sounds. These sounds tell a story, imitating interruptions to flow, being in the home for extended periods and all this entails.

 

Creators:

Mark Iain Pilkington is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. His practice encapsulates sound and image to extend spatial imaginings between real and virtual space. The coupling of sound and image are applied to electroacoustic composition, installation and screen-based works. Forging immaterial and creative labor through a network of interwoven and augmented territories, his work increasingly queries the way operations carry great critical and creative potential. Seeking new modes of critical engagement that incorporate multiple narratives through non-digital and digital aesthetic informs the direction of his pedagogy. His theoretical research focuses on the relationship between artistic genres and their respective aesthetic theories with reference to electroacoustic music, sound synthesis, visual music, coding, philosophy, and film. His practice focuses on audio-visual composition using real and virtual entities to explore time and space. Collaborative interdisciplinary work is carried out with other composers and visual artist/s. 

His work has been performed and screened at ICMC, ARS Electronica, Royal Academy of Arts, The Royal Society, ZKM | Karlsruhe, MANTIS festival and the Open Circuit Festival. Commissioned by Google, Future Everything and the Arts Council England. Awarded the prestigious Giga-Hertz Production Prize for Electronic Music in 2020

Manuella Blackburn is an electroacoustic music composer who specializes in acousmatic music creation. Her music focused on intricate details and the clustering and careful arrangement of small sounds within clear, polished sound worlds. Her sound recording of everyday objects, environments and instruments make their way into new pieces through the transformation of the ordinary into the fantastical. Manuella’s music has been performed at concerts, festivals, conferences and gallery exhibitions in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the USA.

Manuella is currently based at Keele University (England, UK) and is a Reader in Electronic Music and Sound Design.

Software – Final Cut Pro, Processing, iMovie