In an interview from 1991, John Cage, sitting in front of a partially open window in his apartment on the corner of West 18th Street and Sixth Avenue, speaks about the beauty of listening to the sounds of Manhattan traffic. “I love the activity of sound” he declares, such sounds are not “talking to us or trying to be anything, they just are.”
My research and design practice concerns itself with our relationship to air and atmosphere, of which sound is of course an important element, and how designing with atmospheric phenomena can constitute a new design practice; one which I refer to as the Aesthetics of Air. I have previously written about the importance of porosity in our built environment to allow such atmospheric phenomena to enter our lived lives. Phenomena that are not unfamiliar, simply unexpected and of the moment.
In this essay I will take a slightly different but not altogether unrelated turn, here I will reflect on and examine the ambient soundscapes generated by eight ‘atmospheric’ installations which are associated and or curated through my research practice exploring air, atmosphere and microclimates.
Of the eight installations I will discuss three had a ‘devised’ scripted soundscape, whilst the other five harnessed the sounds generated by the kinematic and phenomenological forces of the installation itself. But importantly, with the later five installations, the resulting soundscape, although not directly devised, or scripted, is neither entirely ‘unthought of’, peripheral or secondary. It is these five ‘unscripted’ soundscapes that I will focus on, discussing my creative practice and how through ‘listening’ I became attuned to the ‘activity’ of the sounds they produced and worked with these – unmodified – to allow them to become a critical experiential part of the overall phenomenological dynamics of the installation and the exhibition as a whole, and, how in some cases, I decided to undo previous intentions of adding an overlayed ‘scripted’ soundscape.
History
Related Materials
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