As public artists and producers, The Projection Studio has collaborated with universities and academics for three decades, developing creative methodologies for public engagement that have informed numerous projection and audio works, including works I have co-created with the Studio’s projection artist, Ross Ashton.Footnote ¹ Examples of our works include: “Spiritus,” a piece which juxtaposes medieval and modern cosmology and was exhibited at the University of Cambridge, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and light art festivals in the United Kingdom and Germany; “Horizon,” which contrasts medieval conceptions of the earth with earth-observation data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and shown in the United States and the United Kingdom; and “Triquetra,” exhibited in York, UK, which explored the Viking Jelling Dynasty of Denmark and included academics reading in Old English, Old Norse, and Latin.Footnote ²

These works have toured to light festivals worldwide or had their own exhibitions and we are delighted that they have created new opportunities for academics to interact directly with the public. We find that this way of working breaks down many of the perceived barriers to public engagement. There is no requirement for the viewer to visit a museum, pay for a lecture, or open a book. Instead, the viewer might be surprised by the work as they pass by in the street and can find their interest piqued.

Although they may not be predisposed to be interested in the subject, unlike attending a science fair, for example, where visitors are likely to have prior interest in the subject, the chance encounter of a building transfigured by light and sound can stimulate immediate engagement. Our academic partners have found that through this method that research reaches new audiences that would not necessarily have come to this subject by other means.

This article reflects on “Victorian Speed of Life,” an award-winning projection and sound work by The Projection Studio, for which I created the audio. This was developed for the European Research Council-funded research project “Diseases of Modern Life,” in collaboration with its Principal Investigator, Professor Sally Shuttleworth and her research team.Footnote ³ It was first exhibited in Oxford (UK), as part of that city’s Light Night event at the Radcliffe Humanities Building (the former Radcliffe Infirmary). It then toured to a light festival in Poole, Dorset (UK) and to Otago University in Dunedin (NZ). It is available for online viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoYPOK6V7J8. To understand more fully some of the points made in this reflection, I will be referring to that video recording.

Our approach to our artwork is that we are creating theatre as a performance for a live audience, where the media of projection and sound are the “actors” and the building is both performer and stage. For us, the triangular dynamic of “concept–media–audience” is not one in which the audience are passive receivers. Rather, we see them as an active third component, and that relationship between the concept, the technology, and the audience is crucial. The interaction that occurs forms an energetic synergy. We view it as a conversation, in which the audience is “meeting” an idea for the first time. They discover background and experiences which they can then compare to their own. If it is an unexpected encounter, like bumping into a stranger on the street, then the chance “conversation” in which they partake can open new doors of connection that are surprising and memorable.

The technology, used well, provides the bridge, the mode of language, and expression to build this conversation. When asked about audience responses to such light projections, art curator Bettina Pelz observed: “Light is exciting to the eye …. [Light-based works] stage the inextricable link between the image and its perception. Instead of observing an artwork, the viewer is experiencing it.”Footnote ⁴ In addition, audio gives a naturally immersive immediacy through its three-dimensional spatial occupation and the revelation of its content in real time. The audience therefore is actively involved through their senses and emotions in the encounter; through their responses, they are co-creating the final work. It is this inclusive inter-relationship and the stimulation it can induce that we feel makes our work a powerful vehicle for public engagement with research.

This approach has well-established roots. For over two centuries, projection and sound have been used to engage public audiences through artistic endeavour and technological invention. From as early as 1785, magic lantern shows, complete with a showman narrator and sometimes live music or later a phonograph, could entertain and share information with the general public.Footnote ⁵ The magic lantern lecture in particular proved to be a durable format, often focusing on topics the public were interested in, such as travel and other cultures, which were beyond their first-hand personal experience.Footnote ⁶ While such lectures could be commercial ventures, educational institutions found they too could take advantage of the lantern shows’ popularity, from providing science lectures for the working classes at Mechanics’ Institutes, to public lectures by scientists at the Royal Institution.Footnote ⁷ The technology played a key role in the huge rise of popular interest in science during the 19th century.Footnote ⁸ Magic lanterns enhanced lectures by providing visual access to material that the public would not usually be able to see, from unusual animals to exotic landscapes or famous paintings.Footnote ⁹ It was not only about the image. The speaker consciously chose language carefully, injecting humour and surprises and varying vocal delivery to hold interest.Footnote ¹⁰ The magic lantern show continued into the early decades of the 20th century. Filmmaking, as Kessler notes, had by this time moved from being the “cinema of attractions” to a major force in fictional storytelling, while the slideshow with sound continued to offer a flexible format that accommodated a range of uses and presentations, from politics and religious moral instruction to hygiene education.Footnote ¹¹

The use of sound and projection for engaging the public in history and heritage took a huge leap forward in 1952. In France, the first son et lumière was conceived by Paul Robert-Houdin to tell the history of the château of Chambord as, in his words, “un véritable ballet lumineux et sonore” (“a true light and sound ballet”—author’s translation).Footnote ¹² The genre began with experimental pre-recorded audio, lighting and architecture forming, as Éric Monin observed, a “curieuse alchimie,” then later incorporating large format projection.Footnote ¹³ The personal impact on the viewer was prioritised from the beginning and remained a constant through later decades. As the journalist Jean-Philippe Caudron noted: “Formidable! on ‘voyait’ véritablement les rois, les reines et les courtisans, s’exclament les français de 1960 … il songent a ce passe qui est leur passe.” (“Wonderful! We truly ‘saw’ the kings, queens, and courtiers, exclaimed the French of 1960 … they pondered this past, which was their past.”—author’s translation).Footnote ¹⁴

Significantly, this use of media was not only seen as a creative force, but also one where factually accurate information could be imparted as an art form, as historian Jacques Levron acknowledged: “Mais ces spectacles-là, quand ils sont l’œuvre d’historiens sensibles à la poésie, permettent d’admirables évocations.” (“But these shows, when they are the work of historians sensitive to poetry, allow for admirable interpretations.”—author’s translation.)Footnote ¹⁵

At the same time, in the United States, the architects and designers Charles and Ray Eames were pioneering the use of slide technology, multiple screens, creative narration, and music to make audio-visual shows to creatively communicate and teach. Most notably, the “Glimpses of the USA” show was created to demonstrate common ground between Russia and the United States in 1959 at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. As Ariadna Sunyer summarises, such larger scale projection and sound work should not be limited to the definition of “audio-visual spectacle” but can additionally be seen as a “communicative space for debate and the exchanging of ideas.”Footnote ¹⁶ It is to these genres of magic lantern lectures, son et lumière and multimedia installations that The Projection Studio traces its historical lineage. From an appreciation and experiential understanding of these roots, we have developed our own ethos around public engagement work and a model of projection and sound as a unique form of “digital theatre” created by 21st century technology.

The “Diseases of Modern Life” team generously gave us creative space and opportunity to explore our practice with three stated aims: to capture the research discoveries the project had made, to successfully convey those discoveries to the general public, and for that work to arouse interest in the public to explore the subject further for themselves, with support from the research team.

So, we began with a challenge. If asked whether they wanted to learn about Victorian stress and disease, you might expect most members of the public to respond with a polite “No, thanks.” Historical topics that deal with illness and anxiety can seem distant, obscure, or even unappealing.

To meet this challenge, we began with a research period. Following initial meetings with the research team, it struck us that the material spoke powerfully of individual human experience amid intense social change, in this case, through the rapid shift from mainly rural life to industrialisation. I also noticed a looping pattern of human “action–response–action” that drove those experiences. The human “action” of industrialisation created profound change which had negative consequences. The response to this was to seek solutions. The solutions proved unsatisfactory, as they brought their own changes and negative consequences and so, the looping pattern continued (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Action-consequence table. Drawn from author’s Victorian Speed of Life storyboard notes.

This pattern became the narrative arc for us to build the journey through those 19th century encounters. We chose to include the history, science, and technology of industrialisation while building a foreground focus on the experiences of those who lived with these changes and their consequences. The key emotion that came through from the heart of those 19th century first-hand accounts was one of overwhelm. This was also placed within the arc and found expression through the use of projection and sound.

To tell this story, we decided to follow three modalities to engage the audience. First, we used only the perspective of the Victorians themselves. Drawing on the research materials of the team and our own additional research, we used a wide range of contemporary documents, from adverts, letters, newspaper articles, and beyond, to build a script exclusively from the Victorians’ own words. In this way, we could hear how they described their own mental and emotional states resulting from their newly mechanised society.Footnote ¹⁷ Their experiences were also physical, such as living with smog and diseased water. From their accounts, we distilled into the piece simple yet evocative phrases such as “rasping,” “dirty city,” and “banks of cinders.”Footnote ¹⁸

It was equally interesting to hear the Victorians’ own assessments of the value of the changes they experienced. For example, on the impact of the telegraph, we highlighted the increased speed of communication as creating a breakdown in the quality of that information, with news arriving quickly in “scraps” which are “unsifted” and “too fast for the truth.”Footnote ¹⁹ This offered a profound parallel to our audience’s experience of communication today.

Second, to support that individual Victorian perspective, we included the wider context of Victorian audio and material culture, using historically accurate audio effects and images. Our commitment to historically and contextually rooted audio and visual material is very important to our practice. In a number of our other works, such as the Anglo-Saxon monastic world of “Codex” or the post-Ice Age environment of “Animal,” our audiences found the immersive sound worlds we created enabled a form of emotionally powerful “time travel” and “Victorian Speed of Life” presented these same opportunities to engage.Footnote ²⁰ Recordings of Wheatstone 19th century telegraph machines were used to creatively construct the “soundworld” of the telegraph exchange room, for example.Footnote ²¹ To represent everyday music culture, Oskar Cox Jensen’s performance of the Victorian ballad “In A Fog,” by Frank W Green and Alfred Lee, was included along with my own polyphon and steam organ arrangement of the 1852 work “Elektro-magnetische Polka” composed by Johann Strauss II.Footnote ²² Nineteenth century British visual culture was present throughout using original source material. This included medical photography, painted artworks, and the bombardment of imagery made possible by recent developments in Victorian print culture. The collages of posters advertising entertainments at spa resorts, for example, tapped into the marketing of such resorts as a way of escaping the difficulties of urban life (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Projected montage of Victorian entertainment advertisements at spa and holiday resorts. Photo credit: Ross Ashton.

Third, we focused on sensory and visceral human experience. I found through my own audio research that the development of Victorian industrial society brought sharp changes in the urban soundscape, bringing its own new forms of stress.Footnote ²³ The project research confirmed an increase in noise complaints in this period. I became very interested in this and wanted to introduce dramatic changes of pace and sound density to capture the sonic extremes of Victorian life, to give the audience a sensory experience of this change and induce visceral responses to it. For example, the slow rhythm of the solo church bell morphs into the speedy pounding of steam engines. Gentle sea waves at a health resort are disrupted by the sounds of building construction and massed crowds of holidaymakers, determined to enjoy their day out.Footnote ²⁴ I asked myself the question: “what would these changes have sounded like to Victorians who had never heard anything like this before?” Playing the result suggested they experienced increases in scale, density, loudness, repetition, the very components of sound known to induce detrimental stress in human beings.Footnote ²⁵ The audience could feel it for themselves. The artwork was an ideal medium to express this aspect of the research in a way that other media could not do as effectively.

The animation was also able to convey the sense of the stress of overwhelm caused by both pollution and advertising. The lighter and brighter tone of advertising, with its striking graphic art promising healthy solutions, was juxtaposed against the heavy, slow and dark mood of official public health orders and satirical cartoons that illustrated the pollution section that preceded it. Projecting these images of pollution and disease onto the former Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford had particular resonance, and brought the medical challenges of the past dramatically to life (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3. Projected montage of Victorian health advertisements. Photo credit: Ross Ashton.

Figure 4. Official posters warn of the dangers of cholera. The central group is an adaptation of George Pinwell’s, “Death’s Dispensary,” Fun Magazine (London, 1866). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Death’s_Dispensary.jpg. Photo credit: Ross Ashton.

For the researchers, the experience of creating the piece was valuable, with Principal Investigator Sally Shuttleworth, confirming “The research takes on new meaning, and new relevance, for us when we engage in discussions with the artists …. The need to think creatively about how to present to different audiences sharpens one’s sense of the research itself.”Footnote ²⁶ Through performing the audio script, the research team gained public reading experience and connected more deeply with the lived experiences in the text. Shuttleworth noted that for the early career researchers “it was a revelation to see what was possible with historical research.”Footnote ²⁷

“Victorian Speed of Life” was first presented to the public in November 2018, as part of an event called “Victorian Light Night.” On the night of the event, 2500 people participated, including a considerable number of passers-by, who had been drawn in by the unexpected sight of the illuminated building.Footnote ²⁸ Many observed that the lives of Victorians now had a new relevance for them, and they were surprised to learn they shared parallel concerns, stresses, and challenges with the past. This shared common ground with the past induced curiosity and the desire to learn more. As well as fielding questions ourselves during the projection exhibition, further face-to-face engagement took place through talks and activities led by the research team, which included themed music and dance, short talks by the “Diseases” team, booths where you could send telegraph messages, or participate in sessions of the Mind Boggling Medical History game. On the subject of health care, researcher Hosanna Krienke found the audience would, “… come up with their own anecdotes … it was interesting to hear back how our work made them reflect on their own experience.”Footnote ²⁹

Having aroused public interest through the artwork, the opportunity for interaction presented new considerations for the research team. Sarah Green observed that “anybody could walk in off the street. So, trying to plan something that could be equally understood by anyone who would come along was a real challenge … I’ve enjoyed it immensely.”Footnote ³⁰ The creative aspects of the projection and audio offered a new language of presentation that could engage all ages, while communicating the ideas and discoveries of the underlying research. We did not tell the audience what to think, but allowed them to draw their own conclusions.

In acknowledgement of its impact, “Victorian Speed of Life” received two awards in 2019: The “Vice-Chancellor’s Public Engagement with Research Award” from the University of Oxford and “Best Temporary Project” from the Oxford Preservation Trust.Footnote ³¹

Ultimately, the use of video projection and sound as a multimedia installation were able to fulfil both an artistic and an educational role, much as it had done with magic lantern lectures of the past. The piece realised the potential seen by early proponents of the son et lumière genre that art and scholarly research can be presented in a compelling fusion. “Victorian Speed of Life” is an artwork and simultaneously an accessible interface, a place where the 21st century public and the 19th century lived experience could meet in a meaningful encounter. With their extraordinary scale, immersive soundscapes, and almost magical transformations of urban landscapes, sound and light projections offer a uniquely powerful vehicle for engaging public audiences in the entrancing worlds of science and historical research.