PAUSE BUTTON PORTRAITS
To coincide with Sound House, artist Mark Vernon visited three local Rose Hill residents on Thursday 9 July to record their audio portraits. Pause Button Portraits, an on going series of Vernon's, are audio recordings of people and their homes. Unique, intimate and fascinating, each portrait is a one-off.
ABOUT
The Pause Button Portraits are a series of short audio works based around the everyday domestic environment of the home.
Volunteers who engage in the process are asked to talk about their living quarters and take part in a rapid recording session of anything and everything that makes a sound within their home. The recorder is set to record in pause mode and snippets of sound are recorded one after the other in quick succession creating an instant sound collage of each home. It could be thought of as the audio equivalent of an in-camera edit.
Participants are encouraged to seek out and suggest sounds that interest them. This audio exploration of the home almost always leads to surprises and the discovery of something new about the sound environment, which they inhabit day-in day-out.
This expanding collection of recordings will form the basis of a series of radio programmes. It is hoped that eventually there will be an on-line archive of the portraits, which anyone can contribute to by creating and uploading their own pause-button-portraits.
Mark Vernon
Page last edited: 05 August 2009
