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On the edge

 

Use earphones for an immersive, binaural experience.

ABOUT THE SOUNDWORK

The Gap at South Head in Sydney's eastern suburbs is a place of extreme beauty. It is also famous for being Australia's most well-known suicide destination.

On the Edge is a long-form binaural/VR soundwork exploring South Head’s spatial history and its varied conflicting narratives. The work addresses multiple levels of ‘silencing’ from the time of colonial contact and uses sound to give a voice to the unheard. South Head's ruptured history has shaped the perception of it in the past and this soundwork suggests a way to reanimate it in the present.

The thirteen-minute soundwork is best experienced at the Don Ritchie Grove, located a few minutes’ walk from The Gap lookout and can be accessed on a mobile phone. Please use headphones/earphones for a fully immersive experience.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sinead Roarty is a creative practitioner who bridges the fields of writing and time-based art for commercial and creative projects. She has won over 70 global awards, including 11 Cannes Lions and a Grand Prix for Humanity and has been a member of several international juries, most recently at Cannes 2022. Much of her work as a creative director involves projects that engage with culture, with ideas that reflect topics such as the construction of identity, unconscious bias, gender equity, mental health, and women’s health. Recent projects include the I Touch Myself Project X Serena Williams music video (2018), which reached over a billion people; Rethink Praise (2017), a feature-length documentary about gender inequity in Brazil; Virtual Equality (2017), a VR film and installation that used VR as an empathy tool in the lead-up to the Australian same-sex marriage equality vote; and The Woman Behind the Voice (2019), which used body mapping and AI to expose gender bias in voice AI devices such as Siri and Alexa. Sinead’s passion for making work that matters extends to her role as a creative advisor to a number of charities, including Live Ocean and Bump'n (a sex tech start-up for people with disabilities). Her creative writing has been published internationally, including in Best Australian Stories and Meanjin, and her story "Mortal Sins" (2013) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This soundwork is part of her non-traditional PhD at the University of Technology Sydney.

 

CREDITS

Writer/Director: Sinead Roarty

Sound Studio: MassiveMusic

Sound Designer: Abby Sie

Composer: Lance Gurisik

Sound Editor: Madelyn Tait

Place-sound Singer: Deepka Ratra

Eora Fisherwoman Singer: Maddi Lyn Collier

Sound Producer: Katrina Aquilia

Actors: Dalara Williams, Rupert Degas, Aimee Horne, Asher Phillips, Leeanna Walsman

Special thanks to Anna Clark and the team at History Lab and 2SER for permission to use the excerpt of the Eora fisherwoman singing from the Fishing for Answers podcast.