I’ll be getting out the camel hair brush and putting my 1904 Edison Standard Phonograph through its paces at the Catalyst Club, Brighton, 10 December 2009. Hear some commercial wax cylinders from the early 1900s and witness a live recording of a voice from the audience, straight onto a blank cylinder of carnauba wax…

“Finally someone has released a rather fantastic mind reading app that genuinely triggers that “wow – how did you do that?” response.” Phillis, Derren Brown Blog.
Ever wanted to read someone’s mind?
With Telepath, you can convince almost anyone you’re a mind reader. Telepath is a new mind-reading iPhone app that the talented Richard Wiseman and I [...]

Yep, I did say clog dancing.

This dance piece uses a combination of live, solo clog dancing, video loops and audio which plays at overwhelming levels, revealing a danceform that was directly inspired by the machines of the industrial revolution. With performer Caroline Radcliffe.

Lancashire clog is a deeply unfashionable dance form, often misrepresented as a pastoral dance – a sub-genre of Morris dancing. If you’re put off by the faux nostalgia of the Sunday afternoon clog dancing brigade, see us take Lancashire clog back to its genuine roots, as we evoke the sights and sounds of the industrial cotton machinery that inspired it. I’ll stick my neck out and say Lancashire clog is a pre-electronic forerunner of the industrially-inspired music of Kraftwerk and the noise music of bands such as Coil.

Spacedog will be performing a couple of numbers at the latest School for Gifted Children – comedian Robin Ince’s spectacular, celebrating all things scientific.

At the Komedia, Brighton, Thursday 29 October 2009.
8:30pm (doors open 7pm)

I’ve been quite the hermit recently as I’ve been locked away in the archives, wading through old lab books, government documents and other curiosities. This is for a book I’m hoping to publish in 2010.

Spacedog will be performing our latest set at Goldsmiths Great Hall, 16 October 2009. We’ll be performing torch songs, death ballads and eerie English folk songs on a host of instruments, including theremin, laptops, vocals and home-spun musical robots.
We’ll be joining Leafcutter John, the Finn Peters Quartet and Slub for this evening of beautiful musical [...]

Hear a selection of sound clips from 1995 to present.

A few concerns about audio tours, illustrated with some footage of the audio tour in use at Stonehenge.

I’ll be bringing along Spin Recovery, a small, experimental installation, involving robotic bells, cameras and video projections, to Brighton’s first SoundCurious event. Update 11 October: My appearance has been postponed by the venue – I hope to see you there at a later date!

I’m currently migrating content from my old wwww.spacedog.biz site to this new location. Apologies for any errant files, visual oddities or other disruptions while the transfer takes place.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Sarah xx

Over the last few months, I’ve been collaborating with Punchdrunk, the marvellous encounter theatre company, to make a very unusual multimodal effect – one that mixes emerging ideas in perception with a one-on-one theatrical encounter.

I’ll be revealing more about the nature of this effect in a few months, when some formal studies are complete. However, I can reveal we’ve piloted the effect – and have had some encouraging feedback – and have already used it (tentatively) in the recent Punchdrunk show: It Felt Like a Kiss. This show is a documentary, the form of a promenade piece, was devised by Punchdrunk in collaboration with documentary maker Adam Curtis (featuring music from Damon Albarn). It Felt Like A Kiss was created in summer 2009 for the Manchester International Festival.

Hello! You’ve stumbled on my rough and ready page of videos on the Uncanny Valley hypothesis – a hotly debated theory about our very human fear of almost human objects.

Hot on the heels of our shows at the Brighton Festival Fringe and Science Museum, we’re performing our electroplasmic set in Hastings, 20 June. No seance tonight -- but we’ll be making up for this with our eerie electronica and live Edison phonography (recording a voice on wax -oooh!). Venue: Eat@ 12 Claremont (tickets 01424 426768). We hope to see some of you there!

MzTek promotes opportunities for women working in media and computer arts. I’ll be talking about my work and sharing some ideas at their Unplugged session in Leon restaurant, Bankside, 7-9pm, Wednesday 27 May.

This week, Spacedog has been moved by the spiritual teachings of the Tarvuists…

If you’re in London on Wednesday 20 May, you can catch Jenny, Clara 2.0 and me reprising our electroplasmic set at the Science Museum. We’re performing at the Science Museum Late – an evening when adults are invited to come along and enjoy an array of free entertainment

Read some reviews of Electroplasm, the latest Spacedog show, at the Brighton Festival Fringe. Sarah, Jenny, Clara 2.0 were performing with Colin Uttley (at Bom-Bane’s) and Richard Wiseman (at the Marlborough).

Why is some music spookier than others? Which tracks give you a shiver down the spine? Is it the music, the lyrics or the association with a creepy film or place that gives it that edge? Join our mini survey to find the ‘world’s spookiest music’ and hear a live performance of the top-rated spooky music in the Brighton Festival Fringe.

In a gracefully distressed Regency theatre on the edge of Kemp Town, Brighton, I’ll be teaming up with vocalist Jenny Angliss and psychologist Richard Wiseman for another eerie outing, in Electroplasm. 8-10 May 2009 (with a music preview at Bom-Bane’s on 6 May).

I’m back now from the Newcastle where I was exhibiting a few odds and ends at the UK’s first Maker Faire. It was a hugely entertaining weekend — great to meet so many other hardware hackers, crafters and so on. I’ll be posting a few videos and writing about some of my favourite sights — [...]

A cryptozoological marvel from gentleman rapper MC Elemental, highlight of the Marlborough’s recent Steampunk Hidden Cabaret.

I’ll be bringing Uncanny Valerie, Clara 2.0, the robotic bell rig and a selection of other playful experiments with sensors, sound and music to the first UK Maker Faire.

Don’t read this entry if you’re about to eat your dindins. I created this sound effect for Bad Vibes, an exhibit I made for acoustician Trevor Cox to test people’s endurance of the worst sounds in the world.

I’ve created some music for contortionist Delia DuSol, who will be bending her body into some extraordinary poses and squeezing herself into a tiny perspex box at Richard Wiseman’s first night of Inexplicable Acts, Thursday 12 Feb. This season of shows at the Wellcome Trust will explore the psychology and physiology of circus performers’ bodies, including the sword swallower, the juggler and the exceptionally flexible Delia.

The UK this week has been transformed into a winter wonderland.

Here’s a photographic gem from the Cold War archives, plus some very notable strips of Sellotope (they were used to hold the original Concorde ‘drop models’ together).

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been asked to make at work? Installing a new exhibit at London Zoo today, I met all-round troubleshooter Dave Hitchcock. He’s been asked to build everything from an electronic ejaculator for gazelles to a tiny tracking system, just like an Oyster Card, for Panamanian paper wasps.

I’ll be playing again at the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton, at their next Steampunk event on 21 February 2009. Details to be confirmed – but I expect to be appearing with  the robotic bells, theremin, saw and Good Companion – a rigged Imperial Typewriter. I may also bring along Uncanny Valerie – the ‘all-knowing’ robotic dolly [...]

Pay attention all you skeptics: This is a 100% genuine, independently verifiable, Christ picture, snapped during a monthly cleansing ritual with a Suzuki Wagon R.

Do you worry about your pet chicken getting lonely when you’re away? Well researchers at the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore certainly do – and they’re tackling the problem with tactile computing.

This highly unusual, public experiment explored the strange psychological effects of infrasound – sensations that may explain why people feel a sense of awe during cathedral organ recitals or a sense of unease in seemingly haunted sites. Venue: Purcell Room, London, May 2002.

This is my Mk III robotic bell rig, designed to make it easier to take the bells to venues. I’ve already used the bells in my own compositions at the Gasworks Gallery, Vauxhall (a Resonance FM night, curated by Ed Baxter) and at the Freebutt, Brighton. Here, for Christmas 2008, they’re playing Troika (from Prokovief’s Lieutenant Kije).

In December 2006, Spacedog assembled a group of musicians in the reverb chamber of the UK National Physical Laboratory. This room has one of the longest reverberation times in Europe. Here are some videos of our extemporisations in this highly unusual musical space.

An arrangement of sounds from Croydon’s wonderful fruit and veg market. There has been a market in Surrey Street since the 13th century.

The theremin AV controller is a device I’ve created to scrub audio and video samples live, using the pitch and volume aerials of the theremin. Here’s a video of it in action, manipulating samples from the Hammer classic The Devil Rides Out.

Named in honour of the original theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore, Clara 2.0 is a robot doll who can play the theremin live. I call her the ‘polite robot thereminist’ as she listens to a line from another player and moves her dolly arm to bring her own theremin in perfect tune.

A mini, automatic puppet show in a shed, created on a shoestring budget for the South Bank Centre, summer 2007. The brief was to come up with something novel inside a garden shed that would celebrate the area and appeal to families.

Did you hear the one about the lady on the bus? Hear it on this soundtrack announcing the results of Laughlab – the scientific search for the ‘world’s funniest joke’.

A brief tutorial on how to play the saw, a European skiffle instrument with a haunting, ethereal sound.

Telepath: mind-reading magic on your iPhone.

Look into the radio mirror and put your hands on the founder’s tranquil balls to receive a personality reading with uncanny accuracy. This exhibit for the Cheltenham Science Festival (now on Southwold Pier) explored the tricks used by phoney psychics, recruitment consultants and other ‘cold readers’.