Mark Fisher & Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land

The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present On Vanishing Land, a new work by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.

On Vanishing Land (2013, 45m) is a magisterial audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2005, from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo.

Fisher and Barton have conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast. The work includes commissions from digital musicians, interviews and the reflections of the artists. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates this landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story in M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad (1904) and the atmospheric engineering of Brian Eno’s album On Land (1982). “Themes of incursion – by unnameable forces, geological sentience or temporal anomaly – recur throughout.” (Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Collective, Curator, On Vanishing Land)

On Vanishing Land integrates new compositions by digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman, Raime and Skjolbrot. For the installation at The Showroom it will be accompanied by an untitled sequence of a wide range of visual references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English Heretic).

On Vanishing Land (45 minutes) will play at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm, with each presentation followed by a 50-minute image sequence