In 2013 The Otolith Collective and The Showroom presented On Vanishing Land, a new work by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.

On Vanishing Land (2013, 45min) is an expansive audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2006, from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo.

Fisher and Barton conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings and prefigurations that pervaded the Suffolk coast. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates this landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story in M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad (1904) and the atmospheric engineering of Brian Eno’s album On Land (1982).

‘Themes of incursion – by unnameable forces, geological sentience or temporal anomaly – recur throughout.’ (Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Collective, Curator, On Vanishing Land)

On Vanishing Land includes commissions from digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman, Raime and Skjolbrot.

The installation was accompanied by an untitled sequence of a wide range of visual references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English Heretic).

The work was premiered at The Showroom in 2013, as part of an exhibition co-commissioned and produced by The Otolith Collective and The Showroom.

In 2019, The Showroom hosted the first combined playback of On Vanishing Land and londonunderlondon, also by Fisher and Barton. The event, Incursions, Departures, culminated in a conversation between Barton, Dalia Neis (voice in londonunderlondon) and Pete Wiseman (musician on On Vanishing Land), along with a Q&A and general discussion.

On Vanishing Land was released as an album, on Hyperdub, in 2019