Hector MacInnes
Hector MacInnes
PhD Student
2021 - current
Hector MacInnes is a sound artist whose practice encompasses installation, interview, song, text and speculative design. His work is focussed on the narratives and fictions that shape our sense of place, and on storytelling and the imagination as shared tools for resilience.
He has recently co-curated a group exhibition of future souvenirs for An Lanntair in Stornoway, contributed to the National Library of Scotland’s Re-Sits project with a creative response to the 1962 Pure Maths Higher, and explored experimental uses of traditional Scottish and Cape Breton step-dance. He is currently an artist in residence with the Culture Collective - a pilot network of 26 participatory arts projects, rooted in communities across Scotland - where he is working with people in the Highlands affected by the criminal justice system.
As a multi-instrumentalist and engineer, Hector has worked with various artists across traditional music and electronica including Mylo, Mairearad Green and David Littler, as well as performing with folk-noir pioneers The Dead Man’s Waltz. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Martyn Bennett Prize for Traditional Composition.
A Distant Gate: Encountering Rural And Remote Futures Through Sonic Fiction
Perceptions of remote areas - and of remoteness as a relational concept - are in flux as part of society’s adaptations to climate change, the pandemic and life online. Where the sound arts have traditionally approached the remote through the paradigm of the soundscape, and the conceptual framework of acoustic ecology, my research will explore new approaches which seek to engage with remoteness as highly politicised, increasingly entangled with modernity, and as generative of radical and urgent possibilities.
Starting from the sonic agenda and framework set out in Liminaria’s 2019 “Manifesto Of Rural Futurism”, and by drawing on an understanding of Sonic Fiction as a socially situated (and socially mediated) theory-practice in the writing of Kodwo Eshun and Holger Schulze, my project proposes a playbook of speculative sonic actions composed for remote situations - whether that remoteness pertains to an island, a web server, an incarceration or an interplanetary diaspora.