Grey line [Twilight]

On Friday October 28th 2016, Mike Brookes and I, with the help of a dispersed group of international collaborators, performed the public broadcast work Grey line [Twilight]. The work had been developed over the preceding year, in response to a commission by Consonni, as a propositional intervention into their day-long international symposium and radio event LaPublika. Through our performance of a series of live interpersonal connections, we tracked the sunset edge of the shifting shadow of night – as it slowly moved across the surface of the planet, throughout the day of LaPublika’s symposium. The work’s title references the ‘grey line’ or ‘terminator’, as this line of twilight that borders the shadowed and unshadowed regions of the earth’s surface is more technically known.

The work followed the progress of that one day’s sunset, and its passage, over a scattering of disparate and diverse locations across the earth, towards and over the event site in Donostia. As this thin line of twilight slowly and relentlessly travelled around the world – from the Pacific, across Asia and the Middle East, Europe and Africa, to the Atlantic – we opened a series of sixty-second live audio connections to personal mobile phones, held in the hands of people stood out on the earth’s surface. By giving us temporary access to the microphones of their mobiles, these individuals attempted to allow us to eavesdrop onto whatever may or may not be audible around them, as daytime passed into night, within their personal location and environment. 

Across the day and programme of LaPublika, we periodically interrupted the broadcast schedule to connect live to a series of ten participating individuals – as they each stepped out into their own landscape to watch the shadow’s edge reach them. In turn, these individuals both occupied and highlighted an accumulating series of named geographical positions across the planet’s surface – places selected as delineating points along the path of the progressively advancing ‘grey line’, and for the time periods within which their specific sunsets occurred. The resulting provisional interpersonal audio connections opened moments of access out onto the relentless journey of this one day’s perpetual sunset, and onto one of our planet’s inevitable rotations – intervening into the ongoing public broadcast stream of LaPublika with fragments of broken or familiar sounds from other public spaces, or by simply offering a reflective minute of somewhere else’s live silence. 

Our intervention began at 10:05 Central European Time (CET), as LaPublika programme in Donostia opened, when we interrupted the event’s initial introductions to connect live to the mobile of Maki Nishida in Nagoya, Japan – where the sun was already setting. From this beginning, the structure and accumulation of Grey Line became progressively embedded within the conventions and discussions supported by LaPublika’s continuous programme and radio stream, across a cumulative series of periodic interruptions – each requiring a pause or cut away from the present symposium proceedings to connect live to a named individual, in a named location, where the sun was currently setting. These periodic one-minute interruptions broadcast the fragmentary aural data reaching the event site as a result of our open person-to-person mobile connections, and marked the passage of twilight’s ‘grey line’ across each of the ten participating individuals in turn.

These connections continued with our call to Han Lu in Shanghai, China, at 11:09 (CET); Cauvery Chu in Hong Kong at 11:48 (CET); Alyson Simon in Singapore at 12:51 (CET); Kaori Imai in Kathmandu, Nepal, at 13:38 (CET); Fatima Shamoon in Kuwait City at 16:05 (CET); Fawaz abu Aisheh in Hebron, Palestine, at 16:54 (CET); and Ida Spagadorou in Athens, Greece at 17:30 (CET). At 19:04 (CET), as the shadow of night reached the host site in Donostia, we connected live to the mobile of Olaia Miranda – as she stood on a familiar sunset-facing stretch of the city’s beach, a short distance from the LaPublika event venue itself. Our performance of Grey Line [Twilight] ultimately concluding with a final connection to Ana I. de Lara, walking out in the closing dusk of Bamako in Mali, as the twilight line of sunset moved on, having passed the symposium’s hub in the Basque Country of Spain, and reached her in West Africa, at 20:07 (CET). 

Since then, we have been working on a new manifestation of this work, that performs and records a full rotation of the Earth and the full 24 hour journey of the grey line, or terminator.

A sound intervention into a public radio broadcast co-created with Mike Brookes

A project commissioned by Consonni for their international project LaPublika, produced by Donostia / San Sebastián 2016, European Cultural Capital and Tabakalera International of Contemporary Culture. Photos by Lluís Brunet, Consonni.