Tomorrow we perform Grey Line – an interventional new public art work for radio, that Rosa Casado and I have been developing since spring, and that has turned out be simultaneously one of our smallest and largest scale works. The piece has been commissioned by Consonni, and takes as its context and broadcast platform an all-day radio symposium and public event within their LaPublika programme, into which we will intervene throughout tomorrow…

…Grey Line will attempt to track the twilight edge of the shifting shadow of night, as it slowly moves across the surface of the planet – following the progress of one day’s sunset, and its passage, over a scattering of disparate and diverse locations across the earth, towards and over the public event site of Tabakalera in Donostia, northern Spain. As this thin line of twilight slowly and relentlessly travels around the world – from the Pacific, across Asia and the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa, to the Atlantic – we will open a series of short live audio connections to people stood out on the earth’s surface.

By giving us temporary access to the microphones of their mobile phones, these individuals will allow us to eavesdrop onto whatever may or may not be audible around them, as daytime passes into night where they stand – in Nagoya, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kathmandu, Kuwait, Hebron, Athens, Donostia and Bamako – as they step out into their own landscape to watch the shadow’s edge reach them.

These provisional live audio connections will attempt to open moments of access out onto the relentless journey of one day’s perpetual sunset, and onto one of the planet’s inevitable rotations… carrying familiar sounds of other public spaces… or only fragments of recognisable sound… or simply offering a reflective minute of somewhere else’s silence…

Image: Brookes 2016