Teleports

2025

HMP Isis

London

In 2024 and 2025, we worked with a group of young men inside HMP Isis, a prison in South East London for men aged 18-25. With the young men, sound designer Beth Duke and creative technologist Clarice Hilton, we undertook a series of workshops to explore the connection between place, identity and sound.

One of the outcomes was a spatial audio installation within the prison itself, showcasing eight spatial sound environments belonging to the young men. Each young man was asked go to a place that you know better than anyone else does. A place that is yours. We visit grandparents’ doorsteps, the front seat of a car, a recording studio, a moment in a pub garden in high summer, never to be repeated.

Visitors put on headphones connected to trackers, and moved around the space of Workshop 5 at Isis, freely exploring the sound worlds, narrated by the young men themselves. Alongside their voices are sounds in the scene, chosen by the young men to evoke each place. Listeners’ movements are tracked by sensors – turn your head and the sound moves, walk across the room and get nearer to a distant sound – it’s like teleporting to a place that exists entirely in somebody’s memory, or their imagination.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT TELEPORTS – READ THE REPORT

There was much to learn during our first project within the criminal justice system. We received a lot of help and advice, without which we could not have made the project. We have put together the document Teleports: Co-creating immersive digital art with young men in prison to share some of the process, learning and audience reflections; we hope it could be interesting to anyone wanting to make participatory art in prisons or other secure institutions.