We have been collaborating for over 12 years now, seeking to bring art and music together, as an artist and a musician working together. We’ve been exploring the creation of audio-visual jamming spaces over the past few years and this year we worked with seven fellow neurodivergent Orkney-based creatives to co-create an interactive audio-visual piece of work which was shown at The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.

During the show, we invited musicians Pauline Black, Colin Black and Gemma McGregor to join us in the jam. This video shows a snippet from one of the two day-long sessions we had bringing live, freely improvised music into the audio-visual installation.

Here you see players manipulating imagery and sound in real time using digital input devices and musicians, responding to what’s happening, on their instruments. Here is an environment where art and music come together in a spontaneous creative conversation. In any moment a musician could respond to what’s happening on screen which could influence another musician to play a particular note or phrase; the sound of the musicians, collectively, may send the audio-visual jammer in a direction they may not have by playing alone. What happens in the space becomes a magical and joyful coming together of art and music.

We seek to engender co-creative spaces. Spaces where folk can come together and create together. We take a deliberately passive role. We embrace inaction.

• Being rather than doing
• Sitting together, being together
• Making and allowing the time and space to just be together
• Ensuring everyone has the time and space to be
• Feeling okay with silence, with nothing happening, with the spaces
• Lovely big spaces of possibility

It’s out of the spaces

that stuff will emerge

An idea, a thought, a word, a sound

A movement

Something to take somewhere

Or let go . . .

Let’s just get together and see what happens. Let’s see if we can find the flow. The flow for us, for this group, for this gathering, for this moment.

Let’s just be together

Making space for each other

Imagery from AinsleyPhillips Projects Culture Collective project at Kalisgarth Care Centre, Westray and the Glaitness Day Centre, Kirkwall, delivered 2022 – 2023