My new work Definite/Indefinite is premiering at Catalyst Arts Members’ show this week. Definite/Indefinite is an experiment that harnesses viewers’ internal reading voice (IRV) to create sound art with no directly transmitted audio. Some 20% of people report having no IRV– so for them it’s a visual work. The viewer is presented with a randomly updating grid of cells of text comprising definite and indefinite articles from various languages. These grammatical particles have no independent meaning, but rather indicate the gender, number and, in some languages, grammatical case of a noun. So, these words have a sound when spoken (or read), but do not signify anything else in a linguistic sense when separated from the rest of the grammar. The sound is then purely referential in that it is contingent on the learned or assumed pronunciation of the letter combinations displayed. The piece thus becomes a constantly morphing Dadaist poem heard only in the head of the observer.
A 4-seat iteration of I Just Called got a terrific response from fellow researchers at Ulster University’s Festival of PhD Research at the Coleraine Campus on the 8th and 9th of June!
A special edit of the content from the ongoing I Just Called project will be part of this experimental radio and sound art festival broadcast from The Hague, in the Netherlands.
The Subvert platform is an artist -owned and controlled co-operative entity that seeks to put artists at the forefront of digital music distribution. It went live on 12 May 2026 after several months of testing.
Just finished installing “I Just Called (2026)” at the Old Museum Gallery in Mossley Mill, Newtownabbey.
Now, the installation brings the project fully back into the physical realm, with four vintage telephone seats and modified telephones.
It will be part of ArtsCare’s PRIME exhibition. The exhibition opens on 28 January and runs until 05 March. Thanks to Clare Lawlor and the ArtsCare team for allowing me to be part of this event again this year.
Proud to be a founding member of this initiative to provide an artist-owned alternative to the now hideously corporate Bandcamp. See: https://subvert.fm
Well, that’s a wrap for the “I Just Called” Libraries tour. Thanks to all the folks at Libraries NI for their help and support, and to everyone who came along to a talk or a “meet the artist” day. The project is still available online for the moment, and I will continue to solicit contributions in the form of new messages!
From today, there is a new way to participate in I just Called. You can record a message using the SpeakPipe service and It goes straight to my inbox. Why not give it a try? [Click here]
Come check out new PhD research in music and audio at the Ulster Sound Gallery: part of Presence Lab, our new arts research lab
You will hear creative works by PhD researchers in music/audio practices, all of whom have particular (and distinctive) interests in how music can be spatial and immersive. Colin Woods: ‘Transport’. | Henry Eady: ‘Embodied Martial Arts, Improvisation and Immersive, Interactive Sound’ | Aaron McGlinchey: ‘I am Sitting in a Tomb’ | Peter O’Doherty: ‘Topologies I: Textures’.
