The Underpass (Cambridge)
The Underpass (Cambridge)
The Underpass (Cambridge)
21 September 2025, 5.15pm, 1.5 km from the Underpass, Cambridge
Following earlier public explorations of the Underpass (Cambridge) through augmented reality, The Underpass Project hosted a one-off in-situ presentation of Ness: Displaced, a walking audio performance.
Ness: Displaced is a site-responsive sonic artwork by Zoë Svendsen and Carolyn Downing, with creative technologist Orange.
Participants began their journey from one of three designated starting points approximately 1.5 km from the Underpass, approaching the site while listening via headphones using the Ness app. Each individual journey lasted around 30 minutes, culminating in a shared arrival at the Underpass, where the final section of the audio work was triggered.
The concluding sequence, a 13-minute audio story, was designed to activate as listeners completed the walk, aligning the sonic narrative with their physical arrival at the site.
The work
Ness: Displaced is a sonic adaptation of the prose poem Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood, originally composed in response to Orford Ness, the former nuclear weapons test site on the Suffolk coast, now managed by the National Trust.
The work is set sonically in the Green Chapel, Lab 1 of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, and uses sound to animate and reframe landscapes beyond Orford Ness itself. For this event, the Underpass became the site through which the narrative unfolded.
Originally developed as an immersive performance experienced on Orford Ness, Ness: Displaced was reimagined as a location-adaptive audio walk, allowing listeners to experience the work while moving through a landscape of their choosing, such as a park, woodland, river path, or urban edge.
Technology and experience
Ness: Displaced uses over 150 GPS-triggered sonic zones, meaning that what listeners hear is shaped in real time by their movement, pace, and environmental conditions. The sound world responds as though the listener were walking along the Suffolk coastline itself, creating a layered relationship between distant geography and present location.
This presentation formed part of a beta launch phase, during which audience reflections were gathered to inform the ongoing development of the work.
Credits
Concept and direction: Zoë Svendsen
Sound design and performance: Carolyn Downing
Creative technology: Orange
Text: Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood
Site collaboration: The Underpass Project and Brgs Lenz-Giarlis, AAdipArch ARB RIBA
