Martin Disley is a sound and new media artist based in Edinburgh, who makes compositions, installations and web-based interventions.
His work has been exhibited at locations across Scotland including the V&A Museum, Dundee, the CCA, Glasgow, and Summerhall and Hidden Door Festival, Edinburgh, as well as further afield in the Guterhallen Gallery, Solingen, Sala Aranyo, Barcelona, and various venues in Banjul, The Gambia.
Martin was recently commissioned by the climate-breakdown protest group Extinction Rebellion, to create an audio installation for their co-curated exhibition at Summerhall as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For this project he built several bespoke hydrophones (subaquatic recording devices) and used them to record the source material for the work - the creaking of melting ice; the hum of industrial shipping; the trembling of ferric debris. These materials were then shaped, arranged and spatialised in the studio to produce the final work- a four channel electroacoustic composition.
For Shoormal he will repeat and extend this process with a new composition, bringing hydrophones alongside normal microphones to record and process source material, on location, in the days preceding the conference. After manipulating and arranging this new material in response to the theme, he will perform an improvised version of this new composition live.
In response to the theme ‘The Space Between’, Martin will focus his audio recording in the intertidal zone, the liminal space between land and sea. Intertidal zones are hubs of ecology and industry, they are interesting sources of sonic material and the sites of human and non-human collaboration and collision. Intertidal zones, as subject matter, are made all the more interesting in the Northern Isles as under Udal law they do not automatically belong to the crown - a quirk of law that reveals a unique relationship between these islands people and their land/sea.
These notions of collaboration and collision in the space between, both between ecology and industry and between place and people, will be foregrounded through composition and arrangement of the material.
Martin’s performance took place on Thursday 19th September 2019, Mareel Main Auditorium https://tickets.shetlandarts.org/sales/categories/eventsworkshops/shoormal-conference/the-space-between-thursday-19-
