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Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic An online exhibition exploring and interrogating our cities of sound curated by Lisa Hall. Commissioned by CRiSAP, Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, part of the Un-Earthed Festival directed by Prof Cathy Lane. More information here: http://acts-of-air.crisap.org/
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BREATHING MACHINERY Colin Priest
INTRODUCTION Thank you for inviting me to be part of this exhibition, Lisa, Cathy and the crisap team – it has been great to listen, meet new faces and some familiar ones too from around the world. So – the title of my work is Breathing Machinery – and as Lisa mentioned I’m coming from an architectural background. I am preoccupied with action in space, the processes of revealing hidden things and finding stories in some ways to deepen a sense of place but also to heighten an awareness of our changing world. This fascination centres round how we cooperate with space and enliven histories through gentle behaviour – like walking, talking, listening and so on. With lockdown, I self-isolated myself for no apparent reason to a 1.6 mile radius. And during my government sanctioned one-hour exercise walks noticed them becoming increasingly peculiar – primarily as I live in the London Olympic periphery in Hackney Wick in East London. An area undergoing significant transformation with swathes of construction sites for housing suddenly halted. In the first instance, this led to cleaner air, as there was no more concrete dust, random deliveries and scaffolding. Then as lockdown dramatically decreased road use in the nearby a12 highway, this 5
combination heightened my sensitivity to the silence around me – despite having partial hearing loss! Birdsong came first but then came the whirling air-conditioning units and air vents from the fish smokeries and breweries in the area. At the time there was a lot of discussion in the media about critical care air ventilators, instruments for human survival. And on my walk, a thought percolated about how inside and out, air and its movement, these breathing machines have become critical care instruments to our human and urban survival. The quiet streets drew attention to the sounds of mechanical air extraction units on buildings I’d not noticed before. Motors ventilating vacant warehouses and workplaces to become respirators for a work life interrupted, pushing air into these closed dark spaces. Between necessary refrigeration, comfort and clean air, these ticking metal boxes for me are a symbol of our societal and environmental frailty. The work itself is an invitation to find a mechanical air vent and to listen to it for 30 seconds, to take a portrait photograph of it and direct message or email the photo with an onomatopoeic caption for posting on the Breathing Machinery instagram feed over the exhibition period. These images and texts will then be compiled for posterity into an online 6
record designed with London-based graphic designers work-form. Breathing Machinery, the title of the work underscores the slippage between body and architecture. How objects punctuate space and how space in turn punctures the body. To ask what role do these extraction devices play in our cities, after Lockdown? What do they look like? Where are they? Can we re-hear them again? How do we re-hear them again? The request to translate the sounds onomatopoeically, in any language, connects text, texture and architecture an area I have been exploring for a few years through various forms of collaborative action. The virtual setting of the work transforms this local moment into a global conversation. Pixels and letters mingling to become portraits and paragraphs that we read and potentially mis-read quietly to ourselves. Transforming an internal dialogue, into a public exchange with the built environment. Thank you.
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Brrrrrrrrrrr
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Vrung Vrung Vrung […]
우우우즈즈즈즈즈우우우즈즈즈즈즈
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srrrsrrrsrrrsrrrssschheesrrrsrrrsrrrsrrr ssschheesrrrsrrrsrrrsrrrssschhee
추록추록
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uuuuum uuuum uuuuum
tictictictictic
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gogogogogogoooo
vrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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grgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgr
Hmmmmmmmmmm.....
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hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuuu hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooo aaaaaaoooooooooaaaaaaaaa
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Errrrrrrrrr.....
Gogogogogogo
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Wruuu....hgh....
h-hhhhhhhhhh
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Grrrrrmmmmmmm
Wwwwwwwwwwhhhu wwwwwwwhhhhwww
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Duuuuurrrrrggh
FfffffffFfffffffff Urrrurrrurrrurrr
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GlunGlunGlunGlun KtaaktaktakFtaktak Shshshshshshshsh
(F#) Kho Shuwuhwuhwuh
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huuuuuuuuuuuuuh ssssssssssssssss
schwwwww
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Herrrrrr/Brrrrrrr...
hhhhhh/bbbbbb/RRRRRR
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[]
rrrrrr/mmmmm
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Hrrrrrrrrrr
fshhhhhhhhhh
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grrrgrrrgrrrgrrr
Urrrmmmmmmoooowwwuuuuu rrrrrmmmmmmooowww
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Hiss,hiss, click, hiss, hiss , HISS, HISS, VROOM, VROOM, WHOOSH, hiss.hiss. click. mmmrrr, HISS, HISS, HISS, HISS, WHOOSH, VROOM, hiss,hiss, click
Ffffffwisssss
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CONTRIBUTORS @ t_wickers 9, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 @ ralphsaull 10 @ elly_yu_ 11 @ andreas_helgesson_gonzaga 12 @ christineangs 13, 26 @ mmil____ 14 @ marcelcroxson 15 Takako Hasegawa 16, 23 @ theano.srf 17 M.Hobbs 18 @ merretthoumollerarchitects 19, 22, 28, 43 @ annezilotti 20 @ sophiestonecomposer 21 @ samlwc 24 @ annemarrinsta 27 @ tomteeriffick 29, 30, 31 @ boyle_sports 32 Fearghus Raftery 38, 39 @ jack_rupt 40 @ lisa_hall_ 41 Susan Wood 42
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AFTERWORD From the outset, the idea of a participatory online project was daunting. Will anyone contribute? How will an idea transform from paper to reality? Will it prove useful in a time of multi-faceted urgency and uncertainty? Launched mid-July 2020, the request for an onomatopoeic portrait of a mechanical air vent stirred unexpected and thoughtful trajectories from contributors. The portrait format essentially pulled back the curtain, Oz-like to expose what is hidden in plain sight. As back streets, rooftops, underpasses and balconies arrived, interior and exterior merged to highlight the mutable position of what we can appreciate as circulation space. Unlike the colour-coded pipework on Centre Pompidou in Paris or curvaceous gunite Blackwall Tunnel Vents in London, these portraits reveal an assured uniformity in variations of grey. Across the two-month call out period, conversations with contributors have been engrossing. The focus upon the future of spatial design particularly caught me. Access to fresh air has become a vital narrative in the sustainability of work and home life moving forward. When your afternoon office life was drowsy from over-worked air, no surprise that ‘working from home’ has been a productivity revelation! 45
Combined, work and home, homework, I was reminded of a fleeting undergraduate tutorial around the design of plenum ventilation. A term used to describe mechanical ventilation where fresh air is forced at a slightly higher pressure than the spatial atmosphere to push bad air out. Here this in-between space so often missed raised further questions around how we co-exist with these objects and forms of engineering in our daily lives. Portraits of enduring but dirty, caged and decrepit machines prematurely aged from long exposure to the elements, hope diminished as they are quick-fixed or superseded. These machines become limb-like, not quite to the grandeur of Eduardo Paolozzi’s ventilation tower sculpture at Pimlico Station or the elegance of Charlotte Posenenske’s tube series, these machines settle into the background for the long haul. Slowly, unwittingly they become sage, wizened characters, rasping in and out, that now speak to us? Sensing these objects, beyond the visual, framed the intention of collecting onomatopoeic sound captions to make the invisible visible. Creating a virtual landscape of liminal spaces that embody playful translation and (mis)interpretation. Looking at the thirty-five posts, there is one common character, ‘R’, a rhotic consonant. Like liquid, this letter has certain similar phonological features operating 46
across different languages to help readers apply knowledge, manipulate language and decode the unfamiliar. Altogether, portraits and captions akin to hieroglyphics, image and text scaffold a unique material and spatial language. In many ways we did more than re-hear, we have become air-hieroglyphologists, ready to decode the inconspicuous and urban immaterial. Thank you to Lisa and all at Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic exhibition team, Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, work-form for conjuring this text-image wonderwork and everyone who has kindly taken the time to contribute an onomatopoeic portrait from across the globe, it has been super. Colin Priest
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Thank you to all contributors, Lisa Hall, Acts of Air, crisap (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). Breathing Machinery with introduction and afterword by Colin Priest. Designed by work-form. Typefaces: Ruben (Vocal Type) & Spectral (Production Type) First Edition 2020
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