Mr David Soden

Job: Senior Lecturer in Video

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Media and Communication

Research group(s): : IOCT and Still and Moving Image Practice Based Research Group

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

T: n/a

E: dsoden@dmu.ac.uk

W: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/photographyvideo

 

Personal profile

Working currently as the artist HONEST DAVE, he is interested in the creative treatment of actuality. He takes true stories and incorporates them into songs, photographs, films and installations in an attempt to make sense of the world, but with the deeply held suspicion that the world is NON- sense.

He has an enormously varied creative background including 13 years in community arts as Co-Director / musician / film maker, working with disadvantaged groups in schools, prisons and the wider community. He has expertise in running music and film making workshops with individuals and groups with disabilities. As a director, editor, camera operator, sound recordist, music composer, he has contributed to a diverse range of films, including documentary, drama, art and dance.

From 2000 he has composed soundtracks for many films, live theatre and gallery, with broadcasts on BBC and ITV and presentations in Nottingham Playhouse and Northampton’s Royal and Derngate Theatres, National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield, Phoenix Arts and City Gallery, Leicester.

He has collaborated and continues to collaborate with dancers, digital artists, composers, performers, writers, makers and visual artists, to explore such themes as tragedy, sexuality, compulsion, play, humiliation, voyeurism, mass entertainment, mass media, often with an underlying joie de vivre.

Continuing from his time in Community Arts, his more recent Contemporary Art work still reflects the underlying themes of social cohesion, inclusion and multiculturalism and he is always interested in developing new audiences for artworks. 

Key research outputs

BATH TIME

Interactive Moving Image Installation (Exhibited at Interact Gallery, Leicester 2011 and 2012)

DARK, DARK SHADOWS –

Digital Images with text (exhibited at Pedestrian Gallery, Leicester 2012)

Research interests/expertise

I am interested in exploring how my creative practise, including still & moving image, live music performance, song composition, recorded sound design and interactive installation, can be incorporated into a process of investigation leading to new insights.

  • Extrapolated from the research interests underpinning some current projects in development, I can define these insights to include:
  • Insights into human behaviour and attitudes such as the rise of voyeuristic tendencies in mass broadcast media, the forced migration of smokers from indoors to outdoors, the treatment of perpetrators of domestic violence.
  • Insights into an artist’s creative control, authorship and distribution of work with the proliferation of mobile recording devices, enabling the casual capturing and sharing of live performance.
  • Insights into how people connect with, and relate to, their local, recent, unpalatable history.
  • Insights into audience participation and interaction, within the framework of audience development for the arts.

Qualifications

MA in Creative Technologies

Courses taught

Video component on the Animation, Interior Design, Dance, Film Studies, Media Studies, Photography & Video degree courses. 

Membership of professional associations and societies

BECTU, Musicians Union

Case studies

Bath Time – 500 people approx

Dark, Dark, Shadows – 500 people approx

David Soden