Phanto Spectra
Phanto Spectra
lead artist
IMMERSIVE ARTS
“What if not all magic was a trick?'“
Phanto Spectra was an experimental site-specific artwork combining documentary storytelling, theatre, immersive sound, binaural audio and creative technology to investigate the hidden memories of Dumfries' historic fairgrounds.
Commissioned through the Immersive Arts programme, the work invited audiences to become participants in a fictional investigation led by the Spectral Research Unit - an imagined UK government department tasked with investigating reports of unexplained phenomena, lingering presences and unexplained disturbances across Britain's landscapes.
Upon arrival, participants were recruited as field investigators and equipped with headphones before being guided through the banks of the River Nith. As the investigation unfolded, documentary testimony, theatrical encounters and spatial sound blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. What first appeared to be a paranormal investigation gradually revealed itself to be an exploration of something else entirely: the traces people leave behind within places.
At the heart of the work lay an extensive programme of socially engaged research undertaken with members of Scotland's travelling Showpeople community and the people of Dumfries. Through interviews and oral histories, Martin collected memories of the fairs, family traditions and the changing relationship between the town and one of Scotland's oldest travelling communities. These authentic voices became the emotional foundation of the artwork.
Using binaural audio and immersive sound design, documentary voices appeared to move through the landscape itself - emerging from behind audiences, drifting across the river and lingering within abandoned spaces. Creative technologies were employed as narrative devices, allowing participants to experience memory as something spatial, embodied and alive, where the landscape itself seemed capable of speaking.
Inspired by the Victorian ghost illusion shows once brought to Dumfries by travelling Showpeople, Phanto Spectra deliberately occupied the territory between documentary and magical realism. The fictional framework of the Spectral Research Unit became a means of approaching real histories with curiosity rather than certainty, inviting audiences to consider whether the ghosts haunting a place are supernatural - or simply the memories, traditions and communities we risk forgetting.
Created against the backdrop of growing uncertainty surrounding the future of Dumfries' historic fairgrounds, the work became both an immersive artistic experience and a quietly political act, exploring how cultural memory can be preserved not only through archives, but through imagination, participation and shared acts of remembrance.
As Lead Artist, Martin conceived the artistic vision, narrative framework and creative direction of the project, leading its development from documentary research through to public presentation and working collaboratively with a multidisciplinary team to realise the work.
Preparing the ‘Spirit Boxes’
The Spectral Research Unit
