During the summer of 2010, B-side Multimedia Arts Festival commissioned a number of artists to develop works in response to sites along two routes in Weymouth and Portland. Mike Brookes and I focused on the Dorset seaside town of Weymouth – a town situated on a sheltered bay at the estuary mouth of the River Wey on the English Channel coast – and more particularly on the town’s seafront promenade. The town of Weymouth has been a tourist resort since the mid eighteenth century and is focussed around its harbour – home to cross-channel ferries, pleasure boats and private yachts – and on the long curving bay and promenade of its seafront, that still retains much of its late nineteenth and early twentieth century architectural character.
Mike and I realised an interventional sound work within the commercial amusement arcade building that now stands in Alexandra Gardens – a small triangular area of open ground at the southern end of Weymouth’s seafront promenade. From information gathered from local residents, historians, period newspaper articles and descriptions, we reconstructed the concert programme delivered at the site by the town’s municipal band that same week a century earlier – on the bandstand that had stood in the gardens between 1891 and 1924.
Music from this programme was rebroadcast in situ, amongst the amusements and arcade games that now occupy the site – now called the Electric Palace. The music allowed access to the selection of pieces that had comprised the closing concert of the summer season of 1910, within the amusement arcade building that currently occupies the site, and which echoes both the architecture and location of the original bandstand.
The sound was made available via FM broadcast, to anyone visiting the site with a radio – while remaining otherwise ‘invisible’.
Video by Mike Brookes