David Prior (artist) - Liminal: Sound and Architecture

Liminal: Sound and Architecture

Prior first collaborated with architect Frances Crow in 1997 on Triptych, an installation jointly commissioned by SPNM and the Southbank Centre, London. They worked together again on the Arts Council funded Good Vibrations children's education project in 1999 but it wasn't until 2003 that they formally established Liminal, a design studio with a particular interest in exploring sound and architecture. The partnership has resulted in projects ranging from installations to sound-walks as well as commercial sound design and consultancy and a number of theoretical publications and conference papers. Liminal was formed as a company in order to undertake Swash (2003), a large-scale, immersive sound installation for Living Coasts in Devon and in keeping with other recent work, this piece has evolved into a number of different iterations. Two years after the completion of the installation version of Swash, Prior made an eight-channel, acousmatic concert version of the piece which was first performed at the Martin Harris Hall in Manchester as part of the Sonic Arts Expo, 2006 . In 2007, Prior was commissioned by the SpACE-Net spatial audio research group in York to produce a third, improvised version of the work which has been performed a number of times subsequently. Following the completion of Swash, liminal were made lead sound designers for the Churchill Museum in London designed by celebrated designers Casson Mann. The Churchill Museum has gone on to win a string of awards and was nominated for both the D&AD Award for Outstanding Achievement in Digital Installations and the 2006 Gulbenkian Prize.

Since 2006, liminal have been involved as lead artists in the Warwick Bar development in Birmingham. Their work on this project involved close collaboration with masterplanning architects Kinetic-AIU and has since been cited as an exemplar for artist-architect collaborations by CABE, who part-funded liminal's involvement through their PROJECT fund and features as a case-study in their Artists & Places publication . It was during this project that liminal developed their use of the sound-walk as a research tool, in this instance consolidating the extensive research undertaken into the soundscape of the Warwick Bar site into a binaural walk available to the public. Liminal later contributed to the Cotswold Water Park's twenty year strategic plan, working with masterplanning consultants Scott Wilson and building on the research techniques they developed for the Warwick Bar project on a series of proposals which address the soundscape of the water park. Liminal's recent work has focussed on the creation of 'listening spaces', whether this takes the form of a site-specific sound-walk, such as Black Water Brown Water (2008) or architectural interventions such as Song Pole with poet Larry Lynch (2008), the point of departure for these pieces is to create a reflexive listening experience for the audience; focussing attention back onto the act of listening itself.