It's an Audio Detour

What an audio detour is

Its an Audio De-Tour is a piece of site specific performance art for two people. It goes in through your ears and out through your feet. Each tour lasts 30 minutes. At the starting point, you and your partner pick up an mp3 player each. A voice describes your surroundings and takes you each on a separate but synchronised journey through public and private spaces, using the architecture of the city as stage design. Its an Audio De-Tour layers choreography, soundscapes and stories on top of the real city and asks you to use everyday space with a playful and childlike sense of experimentation, exploration and adventure, exploring places you might normally ignore. It's an Audio De-Tour is made afresh for every space.

Click hear to listen to samples of our most recent tour:

How to take an audio detour:

1. Find one free half hour and one friend/stranger/partner who has one too.

2. Go to the detour starting point.

3. Collect an mp3 player each or download the audio file onto your own player.

4. Press play at the same time and put your player on hold.

5. Listen and follow the instructions you hear for the following 30 minutes.

It's an Audio Detour is a collaboration between Fiona Hallinan and Maebh Cheasty, with sound currently being created by Alex Synge.

Maebh choreographs the route, Fink writes the words and designs.

It's an Audio Detour's sound was previously created by Peter Morrow and, previous to that, by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh.

From April 2008 It's an Audio Detour: Forever and Ever will be available on an ongoing basis from Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

The tour is available to take every day except Sunday from 12pm to 7pm. It takes 30 minutes.

Left: It's an Audio Detour as part of We are Here, a "season of alternative projects probing the physical and cultural landscape through interactive film, mixed-reality gaming, mobile theatre and gently subversive audio tours" in collaboration with Project Arts Centre and Dublin Docklands Authority.

You can see a review by Peter Crawley from The Irish Times for this show here.

Right: It's an Audio Detour: A Christmas Special in collaboration with Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Both videos by Alex Synge.

Some things we hope to do:

- We want to open up our artistic process in an honest way. We believe our artwork to be as much about the way we make it and the people we meet doing it as any finished product. The term site-specific for us means we allow everything about a place influence our work, including the accents, the stories, the faces, the stuff written on walls and the coffee.

- Audio Detours are intended to create a social after experience. By working in pairs our participants are encouraged to talk about the tour they experienced after they do it. We try to create contrasts in each tour that are only revealed through conversations afterwards.

- Without using images, we try to frame sights within cities through the use of sound. By directing participants into specific gestures and combining these with soundscapes and stories we hope to freeze real images throughout the city as artistic moments for participants. There’s good stuff out there to look at.

For some more information you can see our myspace page.

Detours of the past

Trinity Arts Festival February 2006

Our first ever detour was arranged as part of the first ever Trinity Arts Festival. We came together with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh to make this detour as a reaction to the regular tours of Trinity College, where legions of tourists are led on an identical route each day through the campus, culminating in the Book of Kells. The detour was from the beginning designed as a duet, where two participants listened to separate recordings, which led them on diverging and intersecting routes. The participants listened to instructions that led them around the non-places of the campus, including basement lockers in the Arts block, stone pyramids behind the library and empty corridors. They were each read a code at a certain point that allowed them to enter a quiet building at the back end of the college. The detour loosely took the form of a chase, and used the architecture of the college as a series of hiding places and opening and closing viewpoints. The instructions were overlapped with audio excerpts of the writings of Dublin authors James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as well as some observations on Trinity College people and spaces.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival August 2006

Everyone likes Edinburgh. It’s hilly and fun and in August it’s full of millions of people and millions of flyers. Everywhere you walk in the city flyers are shoved in your hands, from people above, below and beside you. We decided to travel to Edinburgh in August and create our tour there. It was an opportunity for the three of us to live together and work at the tour full time, working out exactly who did what and how long it took us to make a tour in a new place. We were fortunately supported by the Irish Arts Council, which allowed us to rent a nice apartment in the city centre next to the Meadows park.

We worked from The Forest Cafe, a not-for-profit arts space, vegetarian café and venue on Bristo Place. There many great people gathered every night, drinking heather ale and sometimes distracting us merrily. We situated ourselves in the Forest’s small gallery, Total Kunst, and covered its windows with Audio Detour drawings about the city and what we were doing.

We finished the tour and launched it from there. Participants were instructed from the Forest Café down towards a small park, where they walked a labyrinth together. We introduced the use of a blindfold into the tour for the first time, as well as a camera the participants use to photograph one another.

The tour’s directions were voiced by our Slovenian pal Petre as well as the Scottish radio presenter, Alex Horsburgh. Alex was working on Festival fm, a temporary radio station installed to cover all the Edinburgh festivals. His voice was good to us, and we made him say things like:

There’s a white line through a park’s path in Balham like this one. Someone has written along it ‘9 out of 10 people who walk this path will do so without stepping off this line.’ In a statistic I recently made up, did you know that 78% of your adult walking will be done without looking up? If you skip and trip then you get to pick the scab that forms, it comes up pink.

More information on these tours to come:

Dublin Fringe Festival September 2006

It's an Audio Detour for the Dublin Fringe, created in collaboration with Caoimhin O'Ragallaigh.

Project Arts Centre December 2006

It's an Audio Detour: A Christmas Special, created in collaboration with Peter Morrow.

We Are Here 2.0, Project Arts Centre/ Dublin Docklands Authority May 2007

It's an Audio Detour: Work and Play, created in collaboration with Peter Morrow.