Sound Mirrors

elaine: 18th Apr 2006 - 16:12 GMT

these pictures are better than mine www.hyperkit.co.uk/dungeness/

GGP: 18th Apr 2006 - 16:47 GMT

these are really cool. i love the idea: sound mirror. all sorts of associations there.

EvilGentleman: 18th Apr 2006 - 20:09 GMT

Based on the pictures in the link, I am guessing they restricted access to the area due to the disrespectful things some visitors carved into the concrete, like the swastika on the 20-foot mirror. Truly a pity that everyone has to pay for the actions of a few imbeciles. Worse yet, I bet the imbeciles still have access, while the rest of us do not.

elaine: 19th Apr 2006 - 09:37 GMT

i think access may have become more restricted in the era of 'rave'.
stonehenge is a bit similar, you can get close, but there are a lot of fences and sentry boxes and whatnot. national trust don't like the partygoer. i think real druids are allowed near the stones on the solstice, but partyers are not. sadly there is no religion i can join to get access to the mirrors, and if i make one up i think they will notice.

indykid: 19th Apr 2006 - 15:53 GMT

Eleaine, you may be right about the raves. Nearby Lydd airport was used frequently in the early to mid-90s for raves held in big aircraft hangers.

Jamie: 23rd Apr 2006 - 13:34 GMT

bloody national trust. i'm sure the sounds mirrors featured in a movie, but i can't think what

Grange: 23rd Apr 2006 - 14:16 GMT

very interesting . Is there still alot of abandoned WW 2 sites around ?
IS there any web sites on them .
Cheers
Derek

Jamie: 23rd Apr 2006 - 14:25 GMT

yeah most rivers in the uk are still flanked with reinforced concrete gun turrets for example. here's a quite uninteresting photo of one close up.

]
some more here

Grange: 23rd Apr 2006 - 15:14 GMT

thanks Jamie , I used some of the links on the urls .Hard to imagine what its like to trip all over these sites, and not remember the war .
Cheers

Jamie: 23rd Apr 2006 - 15:35 GMT

It's easy to miss what's right beneath your nose. The things you see everyday when prevalent enough, blur into insignificance no matter how poignant their presence. Our government attempt to protect such things. Our heritage. Merely disallowing their demolition is not the same thing as protecting them though, as you can see clearly from my, rather poor cameraphone pics.

elaine: 23rd Apr 2006 - 15:50 GMT

also good are martello towers www.martello-towers.co.uk/ and www.ecastles.co.uk/martello.html (and loads more) which were built as defences for the napoleonic wars. they look surprisingly modern and span the suffolk coast down throughout kent. i am sufficiently nerdy to think that it would be an ideal holiday to visit all of them.

Jamie: 23rd Apr 2006 - 16:22 GMT

I think i'm in equally geeky agreement with you on that

indykid: 26th Apr 2006 - 09:43 GMT

In Sussex at Camber Sands, amongst the dunes there are still these concrete bunkers, think they're know as pill boxes? They are odd though, because where they are built on sand, they are literally concrete boxes. Some of them have tipped over. Google ' camber sands "pill boxes" ' for lots of info, can't find any pixtures though.

Another good place to look for old war stuff, particularly in the South East is railway lines. Often there are little one man huts in wooded areas, where apparently they used to stop trains for security checks. There's one I know of in my home town Ashford. Next time I'm home I'll get snapping!

Mark: 7th Dec 2006 - 01:05 GMT

The sound mirrors feature heavily in various projects by art / music / film group Disinformation - the "Antiphony" double CD (packaging features sound mirror photos by Julian Hills from 1996) and "Antiphony Video Supplement" (by film-maker Barry Hale, later retitled "Blackout") which were both published in 1997, with the video being virtually identical to later works by the artists Tacita Dean and Lisa Autogena. The chronology of all these projects is documented in the US art magazine "Cabinet", in an article written by Brian Dillon of the University of Kent, Canterbury.

An "Antiphony Architectural Supplement" was published by Disinformation as a feature in Sound Projector magazine in 1999. A recent press release says that Barry Hale's sound mirror video has been shown at NTT ICC (Tokyo), The Royal College of Art (London), Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst (Leipzig), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) and The Dom (Moscow), the Phonotaktik (Vienna) and Sonar (Barcelona) music festivals, a sound art event in a nuclear bunker in Scotland, and exhibited as an installation at The Mac (Birmingham), Quay Arts (Isle of Wight), Wrexham Arts Centre, South Hill Park (Bracknell), Event Gallery (London), Q Gallery (Derby), The Latvian National Museum of Art and The ICA (London).

Peter Faulkner: 10th Jul 2009 - 07:03 GMT

The three sound mirrors are in fact at Greatstone, not Dungeness.
Please see http://www.greatstone.net/history/sound_mirrors.htm