Time and motion study was a partly site-specific sound installation in an empty factory.
Visiting the recently abandoned building prior to starting work on the piece, I was immediately reminded of a summer job I had in a light engineering factory some 20 years ago.
The oily smells, the pitted floors, the handwritten notices and graffiti, but most of all the distortion in the perception of time brought on by the boredom of repetitive actions; clock watching became the order of the day.
Here digital techniques applied to the ticks of various clocks have yielded fragments of a language of sorts - tuts, groans, and percussions - in the mechanical measurement of time. These sounds are delivered back into the space from which they might have come, by means of a dozen probe-like speakers placed around the floor on the traces or marks left after the heavy machinery had been removed; the wires to the speakers describing shapes in the space on their way down from a central distribution point high up on the ceiling.
Some of the sounds are eerily like those of a still working factory, while the more extensively stretched ticks suggest the wailing and groaning of spectres haunting the space.
Delivered randomly, over multiple channels, the soundscape never repeats itself, the spatial localisation of the sounds means that the experience changes as the viewer moves around, and when the drop hammer from the still working cutlery factory next door is in action, a thirteenth channel joins in.