beacon.black

I recently made a website, beacon.black, as part of ArtAngel’s project Afterness, based at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast.

To quote from the site:

beacon.black is an acoustic experience designed to transport its audience through the desolate but striking landscape of Orford Ness and its history of listening to and transmitting sound.

Conceived by DJ and sound artist Brian d’Souza, this 24-hour radio station revives Orford Ness’s history of spying and signal jamming as well as capturing its current transmissions from migratory birds and the ever-present wind. beacon.black is home to an audio stream of augmented field recordings made on Orford Ness alongside a second stream exploring the history of surveillance and broadcast of the ‘island of secrets’.

It was fun to build something that, for want of a much better word, is more of an “experience” than a standard informational website.

Photos of the area come and go while video from camera traps showing local wildlife fade in and out. Meanwhile you can play one or both audio streams. One plays sounds composed by Brian d’Souza. The other is made up of field recordings from the site or eerie Conet Project shortwave recordings. It’s designed by Futurimpose.

There’s a dash of PHP involved but most of it is HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. As simple and as light as possible, and a fun project to work on.