Sound and Rural Futurism in the Highlands and Islands

Hector MacInnes is a sound artist and musician from Skye, whose work explores the intensifying public interest in places perceived to be rural or remote, and how sound can help us inhabit, participate in, and learn from those places.

In this talk he will discuss recent coinages of the term “Rural Futurism”, and will ask what the role of creativity is in safeguarding the evasive identity of place, amid feverish speculation about spaceports, immigrant detention centres, or rewilding.

Hector will demonstrate some recent projects, including: an experimental music theory based on a Stornoway International Airport that never was; the regeneration of a Broch as a choral maths processor; the first few entries from a diary he kept, while walking through rural England with a small box that emits white noise.

These - he hopes - will open a discussion about the processes and experiments that make and unmake place, the ways that rural and remote places determine their own futures, and how they respond to those who would make that determination for them.

This event will have live captions, if we can make it easier for you to attend this event or help with access in any other way please get in touch with admin@atlasarts.org.uk in advance of the talk.

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HECTOR MACINNES

Hector MacInnes works across a range of projects, including writing original songs for the play We Have Won The Land, creating a Yeti Museum in a shipping container with artist Kate McMorrine as part of Skye and Lochalsh Talent Development Initiative, collaborating with Jason Singh and David Littler through their Sampler/Cultureclash project as part of Spincycle-Skye, and working on Story’s End, a major collaborative project exploring death in narrative, with The Dead Man’s Waltz and a host of visual and literary collaborators.

In his role as a producer and engineer, MacInnes has worked with some of the finest acts in Scotland’s folk and acoustic scenes. He also teaches recording and production at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. In 2013 MacInnes was the winner of the Martyn Bennett Prize for Composition.