Testing Ground (2025)
3 screen video, 3-channel sound
10:30 min loop
Image and text by Henrietta Williams
Sound edit and spatial sound design by Merjin Royaards
Testing Ground investigates how conflict and violence translate across time and space to impact upon our contemporary lived experience of the city. Operation across visual, sonic, and haptic registers the project is a collaboration from artist/researcher Henrietta Williams and sound architect Merjin Royaards.
The materials used in the installation are drawn from 3 sources: a cache of video materials made by the British Army in Belfast in the 1990s and later deposited in the Imperial War Museum Film Archive; the operational archive of the National Police Air Service helicopter team with a particular focus on moments of public protest in London from 2020-2023; these are synthesised with a set of visual and sonic field recordings gathered at ground level by the artists as they mingle with protestors on the streets of London.
Surrounded by an arc of images, sound, and vibrations, the viewer becomes both the watcher and the watched. The installation develops an understanding that aerial systems, in use over London in this current moment, have a direct correlation to the technologies used by British Army helicopter surveillance teams over Belfast in the 1990s. Through a visual and sonic interplay, the violence of helicopters operating across time and space is interrupted with the embodied presence of an individual at ground level. The view from above is troubled through this ground level disruption – the power of the aerial gaze is dismantled and disorientated.
3 screen video, 3-channel sound
10:30 min loop
Image and text by Henrietta Williams
Sound edit and spatial sound design by Merjin Royaards
Testing Ground investigates how conflict and violence translate across time and space to impact upon our contemporary lived experience of the city. Operation across visual, sonic, and haptic registers the project is a collaboration from artist/researcher Henrietta Williams and sound architect Merjin Royaards.
The materials used in the installation are drawn from 3 sources: a cache of video materials made by the British Army in Belfast in the 1990s and later deposited in the Imperial War Museum Film Archive; the operational archive of the National Police Air Service helicopter team with a particular focus on moments of public protest in London from 2020-2023; these are synthesised with a set of visual and sonic field recordings gathered at ground level by the artists as they mingle with protestors on the streets of London.
Surrounded by an arc of images, sound, and vibrations, the viewer becomes both the watcher and the watched. The installation develops an understanding that aerial systems, in use over London in this current moment, have a direct correlation to the technologies used by British Army helicopter surveillance teams over Belfast in the 1990s. Through a visual and sonic interplay, the violence of helicopters operating across time and space is interrupted with the embodied presence of an individual at ground level. The view from above is troubled through this ground level disruption – the power of the aerial gaze is dismantled and disorientated.