about the cassette

Christmas morning, 2016. Santa Claus busking on the empty streets of Brighton city centre. Taxi drivers and recycling trucks navigate the near empty streets. Dog walkers, cyclists, the intermittent burst of passing youths. Santa presses methodically against the keys of a cheap plastic keyboard, its sound, emitting from small battery powered speakers, barely audible above the hub-bub of passing traffic. Years later, the associated recording is fed through a spectral resonator, subject to the same distortions and contortions of the mind, the poverty of human memory.

Distant Animals is the artistic output of Daniel Alexander Hignell, a sound, video, and performance artist. His work focuses on the political and participatory resonance of creative acts within shared space, interrogating notions of autonomy, collaboration, and the tension between sense (what is perceived by the senses) and sense (what is made sensible by a community).