Swash

‘Swash’ was Prior’s first collaboration with architect, Frances Crow, working as ‘liminal’. ‘Swash’ is a 24 channel sound installation commissioned by Paignton Zoo as an artwork for its ‘Living Coasts’ sea life visitor attraction, and was funded by RALP (Regional Arts Lottery Programme) Arts Council of England, South West.

'liminal' set out to explore possibilities for an ‘expanded’ architecture in which a loudspeaker system might provide an additional prosthetic layer to the building, through which the physical constraints of the space could be explored, augmented or subverted. We mounted independently controlled speakers in a tunnel space at equidistant intervals, sufficiently close together to enable smooth transitions to be made from one speaker to the next. Using the speaker system we devised a series of complex movement models derived from behavioural patterns found in the movement of water which could be applied to sounds which, themselves, had all derived from recordings of water in different environments. We made underwater recordings using equipment from the University of Plymouth's Ocean Science labs land deployed a wide range of location and studio recording techniques prior to the processing of material used in the installation.