Biography
Joseph Young graduated with an MA Design by Independent Project from University of Brighton in 2005, after a 25-year career as an actor and composer, refocusing his practice as a visual artist. He makes sound pieces, installations and performance works for galleries, site-specific spaces and digital media, whilst retaining a connection to his former theatre practice through occasional sound design commissions.
Joseph’s work has been exhibited at Seoul Art Space Mullae, British Ceramics Biennial 2017, Towner Art Gallery, Shetland Museum & Archives, Errant Sound Berlin, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Pallant House, Jerwood Hastings, Estorick Collection and Seoul Museum of Art. His sound pieces have been published and broadcast by Radio 3, Public Record, Furthernoise, One Minute of Silence, Radio Papesse and Resonance FM.
Recent large-scale works include Revolution #10, a participatory public artwork about democracy which was presented at the House of Commons in March 2015 and The Ballad of Skinny Lattes and Vintage Clothing, an ambitious 6 movement noise opera about artists and austerity. Sound commissions include Sensing Culture at Lewes Castle, a permanent sound installation and an interactive audio guide.
As his artist alter-ego, Giuseppe Marinetti, he created the Neo Futurist Collective, a visual and performance art group dedicated to the celebration of urban noise and that acknowledges a debt to the Milan Futurists and, in particular, to Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises manifesto. In summer 2018, the Estorick Collection showed a 10 year retrospective of the Neo Futurist Collective’s work – Make Futurism Great Again, at the end of which the collective self-destructed.
Statement
A fascination with noises informs all of Joseph’s work. His practice engages with the contemporary sound world to unpick and reframe the notion of noise as unwanted signal.
His process begins with listening to and recording everyday sounds. Back in the studio, he works with these sounds in many different ways, depending on context. The end result may be a composition, sound design, installation, soundtrack, podcast or radiophonic work.
Joseph utilises binaural sound recording techniques to capture an immersive sonic experience and through mediating the listening process, he invites my audience to consider what the sound of the world has to tell us about its various social conditions, culture(s) and political geographies.
Joseph is currently working on a practice-based PhD “Killruddery: Listening to the archive” at SMARTlab, part of the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Ireland at UCD, funded by the Irish Research Council and Killruddery Arts, Culture, Ecology & Heritage.
