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 here 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.
Detours of the past
Trinity Arts Festival February 2006
Our first 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. At the beginning the detour was 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 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 observations on Trinity College people and spaces.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival August 2006
We worked from The Forest Cafe, a not-for-profit arts space, vegetarian café and venue on Bristo Place. 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.
