Carrlands: mediated manifestations of site-specific performance in the Ancholme valley, North Lincolnshire

The aim of Carrlands is to create a series of related site-specific performances over a period of twelve months, for three locations in the agricultural valley of the river Ancholme in North Lincolnshire. Such performances represent both an innovative mode of enquiry and a research output, within the field of Performance Studies.

In integrations of academic research procedures and professional, aesthetic practices, the project will:
- Develop a methodology for the examination and explicitation of the complexities of
landscape, as it is variously and diversely defined and studied.
- Advance the interdisciplinary apprehension of landscape, within a performative
medium that can facilitate rapid shifts in attention to, and account of, place.
- Enhance and stimulate public appreciation and understanding of landscape, through
the inclusion of the perceptions of disciplinary expertise within an accessible
performative framework.
- Strengthen local and regional regard for landscape through providing opportunities for
participation in a) the generation of performative material; b) the reception of that
material in performance; c) the monitoring of effects.
- Create performative interventions that can include the perceptions of insiders: utilising
and placing material from personal, familial and communal sources in an academic
context.
- Make a significant critical contribution to the emergent notion of practice as research,
within the disciplinary field.

Carrlands is designed as a small-scale case study ina region familiar to the principal investigator, it is the area in which I was born and raised. Lacking conventional scenic heritage and startling vistas, it is in an out-of-the-way area, far from the tourist trail. But it does provide a special opportunity to both study and explain the processes of landscape formation and the role of human agency; to problematise notions of landscape as purely visual construct; and to occasion a critical reappraisal of the inherent qualities of places rarely visited. Performance is conceived as a mechanism that precipitates and encourages visitation; that informs presence; and that illuminates places that do not easily reveal themselves.

Each performance is only available in mediated form, as individual soundworks: an integration of recorded texts from expert and popular sources and in a variety of registers, set within a specially generated musical matrix. The spoken texts derive from a variety of disciplinary and analytical approaches, juxtaposed with local observations and opinions and with the perceptions of the principal investigator, who is present as the lead voice, framing and contexting diverse material. Their uniqueness lies in the invitation to action. Within their fabric, they include sequences of instructions to users - suggestions on how and where to move, and look. The audience member is at once performer and spectator; there is a shift from the optic to the haptic in the apprehension of landscape, cast as much as place of work as prospect.

The soundworks are disseminated and publicly distributed in the form of a streamed 'free-to-listen' pod-casts, initially available through specially designed, dedicated pages on the University of Wales, Aberystwyth website. Whilst the soundworks do exist as autonomous art works, it is intended that they should be downloaded as MP3 files and taken to the location, where they offer a particular mediated engagement, and accessed through the personal equipment of the participant. Significantly, the participant is free to choose the time, season, weather, personal mood and social conditions - alone, in a group - under which the location is visited.

The website will offer opportunities to respond not only through soliciting opinion on the efficacy of the work bu