Hector MacInnes is a sound artist and musician from Skye, whose work explores the intensifying public interest in places perceived to be rural or remote, and how sound can help us inhabit, participate in, and learn from those places.
In this talk he will discuss recent coinages of the term “Rural Futurism”, and will ask what the role of creativity is in safeguarding the evasive identity of place, amid feverish speculation about spaceports, immigrant detention centres, or rewilding.
Hector will demonstrate some recent projects, including: an experimental music theory based on a Stornoway International Airport that never was; the regeneration of a Broch as a choral maths processor; the first few entries from a diary he kept, while walking through rural England with a small box that emits white noise.
These – he hopes – will open a discussion about the processes and experiments that make and unmake place, the ways that rural and remote places determine their own futures, and how they respond to those who would make that determination for them.