Bassline

Bassline is a ‘city-specific’ large-scale sound and video installation revealing the transit of a line of individual walkers as they follow a double-bass player carrying their instrument through the city. The images taken by body-worn cameras captured at steady intervals are projected on translucent screens in a linear subterranean space. They reveal the city in time showing both different locations in the same moment as well as showing the same location at different times.

The line of screens is accompanied by a solo bassline and the voices of the walkers who have recorded their passing impressions.  Bassline is a formal exposition of the city as a physical space haunted by and co-composed, moment by moment, by the bodily memory of its diverse inhabitants.

It was installed in Vienna in the U-Bahn in a service tunnel between two stations in Vienna Festwochen, 2004 and later in Car Park 5 of the Barbican Centre in London, 2009

It’s like a ghost train whose carriages are made of the flickering images of lost streets and whose passengers are disembodied voices… wonderfully impressionistic, eerie and moving
Time Out London

Bassline captures the transience of city life and a sense of ghostly, layered history
The Independent

Bassline: London was produced by Artsadmin, co-commissioned by barbicanbite09 and supported by Arts Council England.