Tracings – Culture Night Drogheda 19/09/2025
Tracings was a site-specific project created for Culture Night Drogheda 2025, built around the idea of capturing a town in motion. Developed through field recordings, video fragments and onsite observation, the work abstracted Drogheda’s everyday movement into sound and image across multiple installations, performances, and public interventions. Spread through the town the night included: eight live pieces at The Kiosk, visuals in shopfronts and an interactive street installation. Tracings formed a connected, multi-modal portrait of place: immersive, shifting and always in conversation with the people moving through it.
Process
Tracings developed over several weeks of working in Drogheda. Field recordings captured the movement of the town traffic, machinery, voices, street noise and the shifting energy around The Kiosk and nearby streets.
A range of microphones were used, including standard handheld recorders, contact mics, and geophones. These allowed both airborne sound and ground-level vibration to be captured, giving a broader sense of how the town moved. The recordings were then processed and shaped into a series of sonic elements that formed the basis of the compositions for each piece.
The visual works were created from video footage recorded throughout the town, including time-lapse footage and slower observational shots of everyday activity. The footage was then abstracted into a set of textural visual pieces.
The Kiosk — Live Performances
At the centre of Tracings were a series of live performances at The Kiosk. Across the night, eight performances (Tracings 01–08) took place, each running for approximately twenty minutes.
A shared set of sound and visual material was developed during the process phase. For each performance, these elements were assembled differently, with structure and pacing shifting in response to the space and the people present at that time.
Across the eight performances, the work moved between quieter, more restrained passages and denser, more immersive sections, allowing the material to be approached from different angles over the course of the evening.
Rather than repeating a single piece, the performances allowed the material to be explored in multiple ways across the night.
Tension — Interactive Installation
Tension was an interactive installation in the windows of the Choice building on West Street. The work was built using TouchDesigner, with MediaPipe used for motion tracking to detect hand gestures in front of the screen.
Gesture data controlled the sonic and visual elements, allowing the audience to shape how the piece evolved over the course of the night.
The installation ran continuously throughout the evening. It was experienced by both by organised walking tours that stopped at the site and by people passing through West Street, providing a persistent interactive element within the wider programme of performances and screen-based works.
Shopfront Screens & Bigmoon Records
Alongside the live performances and interactive installation, Tracings was presented as a series of screen-based works distributed across Drogheda.
Four long-form visual pieces — Motion, Structures, Presence, and Change — were shown on shopfront screens throughout the town. Each work ran continuously and explored different aspects of movement and rhythm through abstract visual form. The screens operated independently of the live elements, allowing the material to be experienced in passing or over longer periods of time.
At Bigmoon Records, the four visual works were combined into a single compilation and screened throughout the evening. A DJ set accompanied the screening, extending the atmosphere of the work without being directly integrated into the other installations.