Sonorous assemblages. Speculating a metallurgical aesthetic of airport media art

ABSTRACT

As airport terminals continue to expand, the level of noise steadily increases, and yet when we think of an airport lounge, we tend to recall an image rather than a sound. Simultaneously, modern airport terminal design incorporates sound media artworks that appear to be adding to the existing cacophonic soundscape. Understanding that sound plays a formative—albeit often nonconscious—role in the shaping of our sense perception of (airport) space, in this article—resorting to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s radical empiricism—I speculate an immanent and metallurgical approach towards airport sound art, which puts forth aesthetic experience as essentially entangled with airport space and the sensorium. Engaging with two of an American artist, Christopher Janney’s airport sound and visual installations, the article posits sonorous assemblages to explore a sonic aesthetic of airport experience. In probing the boundaries of routinized perception, it thus forays into an extraperceptual dimension of spatial aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic experience, airport, Christopher Janney
• Gilles Deleuze
• sense perception
• sound art

If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue of not only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy… —Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (2004, 453)

From the perceptual to the perceptive¹

As the airport terminal buildings continue to expand, the level of noise steadily increases.² It is reported that an average terminal building—alike a noisy classroom, busy office space or a hospital ward—is recorded with noise loudness as high as over 90 dB, which nearly doubles the acceptable norm.³ What used to be perceived as quiet retreats, lounges are now transforming into hubs of not solely international transportation, but also for serving a variety of other purposes ranging from the increasingly upgraded retail and dining areas to playrooms and kid’s play areas for parents traveling with children, spa treatments, entertainment zones, casinos, interactive gardens, movie theaters, swimming pools, and museum and exposition areas, becoming yet another arena of competition between the airlines and commercial businesses.⁴ Although designated snooze and quiet zones, available free of charge for every passenger, are an emerging trend,⁵ a structural dichotomy of the hustling and bustling concourse area and a euphony of the exclusive, membership- or entrance fee-based, lounge offering a secluded sanctuary for relaxation with unobtrusive and chilling music is still maintained. This largely consumption-driven enhancement effectively contributes to an increase in the general level of clamor experienced inside airport terminal. And yet, curiously enough, when we think of an airport terminal, we tend to recall an image rather than a sound, which is clearly due to the hyperpresence of screens and visual communication at airports nowadays (e.g. schedule displays, signage systems, self-check-in kiosks, advertising panels, CCTV, automated security checkpoints), which dominates the passenger’s sense of hearing, and has hitherto been covered by a considerable scholarship.⁶ Save the periodically published reports based on an analysis of the level of noise airports systematically conduct and its reduction procedures they implement, the relationship between the sense of hearing, or sound more broadly, and the space of an airport terminal, however, remains barely addressed from a wider, cultural and aesthetic perspective⁷ in general, and specifically from a radically empiricist, immanent angle, and an embodied and embedded, singular passenger’s vantage point, in particular.

Although sound was scientifically recognized as a significant factor that determines our perceiving of architectural space only near the end of the nineteenth century with the onset of acoustics, its essential role in creating concrete spatial experiences had been known since the emergence of ancient theater. Critical, however, is to remember that ancient Greek culture, which invented new spaces for theatrical and philosophical performance, heralds a radical shift away from an antecedent acoustic space to a visual one. As Edward T. Hall established, there are different senses of space engendered by different sensory organs (1966), and so, henceforth in Western culture, omnidirectional, limitless, and immersive space of hearing has been replaced by a geometrical, linearized, and quartered, space of sight. Predicated on the dominant status of the visual, literacy as a prerequisite for modern science has spatially detached and distanced us from the world (Ong 1982). Acoustic, eco-logical, space has been supplanted by optical, ego-logical, one. Interestingly, already in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter observed that increasing presence of the electronic media was gradually restoring the experience of acoustic space and environmental consciousness (1960), to which the prominent concept of audience focusing on the reception of messages testifies. Erika Fischer-Lichte aptly captures this renewed, ecological relationship which determines our aesthetic experience of sound media, “Sounds … surround a perceiving subject, enshroud it, and insinuate into its body. The body becomes a resonance box for audible sounds and begins to vibrate along with them” (2008, 129). The downside, however, of the current hyper-saturation of digital media, which airspace particularly exemplifies, is that we wind up exposed, and thus grow habituated, to the mediated (i.e. edited, altered, and amplified) streams of sounds which generate a degree of aural stimulation unmatched in natural situations. Generative of considerable noise people are forced to listen to, airport space symptomatically reveals a specific political economy of communications, whereby the capacity for deliberate and critical listening weakens and, paradoxically enough, no longer needs hearing. Such a media-fostered, functionalist approach to sound in built environments in general, and in airspace in particular, has culturally dominated an aesthetic one, the latter being rediscovered only relatively recently by architects.⁸ Importantly, media artists were the first to have come up with various modes of sonic intervention into functional spaces. Understanding that sound plays a formative—albeit often nonconscious—role in the shaping of our spatial and aesthetic experience in a sonically intensive economy of the airport, I will thus address two interactive art installations that specifically target and engage sound apparatus by an American architect and also jazz musician, who was commissioned by several airports across the USA—“Sonic Gates” at Will Rogers International Airport, Oklahoma City (inaugurated in 2016), and “Harmonic Convergence” at Miami International Airport (opened in 2011). Although it is not held affectively by people, the space of air terminal appears particularly relevant for aesthetic research into sound artworks due to its specific, architectural, relationship with air as the medium of sonic transport. Notably, accentuating light, levity, and comfort, conventionally associated with jet flight, Janney’s airport media art engages travelers in innovative, memorable, and considerate experiences, thus extrapolating and enriching aesthetic experience. As such, his specifically airport-commissioned art installations can well be regarded as “design interventions”, which were intended to enable spaces for passengers’ novel and playful interactions while entering and wayfaring through the terminal buildings. This article’s objective is to examine and speculate how a physical, artistically enhanced, space of air terminal can sensorially engage bodies and foster, what I would designate as, a political-aesthetic pedagogy, through extrapolation and augmentation of their spatially routinized sense perception.

Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s immanent and radically empiricist philosophy, in what follows, I will explore the intensive sonorous assemblages that are sensorially and spatially constructed in between these airport artworks and passing bodies, beyond, or beneath, the regularly perceivable—overwhelming and ultimately numbing—cacophony of the surrounding hubbub of echoing footsteps, murmuring phone conversations, monotony of casual business exchanges, braying announcements and droning televisions, and thus offering an insight into some of the overlooked aesthetic aspects of the sounding potential that is being generated in the airport space. Even though frequently (mis)read as expressive of cosmic or creationist materialism, Deleuze and Guattari’s radically empiricist, philosophical project has thus been deemed insufficient, or utterly inadequate, to address especially the social and political (human) existence.⁹ Adhering to their insistence on the continuum, and immanent co-expressivity, between metaphysics and social critique (Gatens 1996), I will assert their utmost relevance and timeliness for examining sensory relationships between art and airport space. Therefore, in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s radical empiricist account, I will argue that the aesthetic potential of Christopher Janney’s airport sound art installations can be properly discerned and appreciated in the middle, when experienced immanently in a syn(aes)thetic and concatenative—i.e. properly metallurgical—becoming-imperceptible. Consequently, disavowing any pre-established and fixed meaning and use of the concept of metallurgy—instead of offering either a traditional analysis of airport sound(art)scape by means of the notion of metallurgy, or interpreting the artwork to develop an understanding of metallurgy—I will work diffractively in the middle, thus demonstrating how Janney’s airport art installations and metallurgy become aesthetically and conceptually co-expressive.

Crucially, my proposition of a metallurgical approach to, and understanding of, our sensorial and spatial engagement with sound artworks in airspace sets itself apart from the scholarship in both auditory culture (which prioritizes audile techniques, technological mediation of sound, and phonic modes of reception), and especially in sound studies (which pit themselves against the legacy of the linguistic turn in the humanities and, instead, prefer to explore the affective and nondiscursive realm of the sonic thus accounting for the ontology of sound), which in itself aptly illustrates a characteristically Western entrenched split between nature (sound’s abstract materiality) and culture (sound’s lived sociality). Even though explicitly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, such representatives of the sound studies field as Goodman (2009), Cox (2011), Hainge (2013), who develop their distinct theories of sound in ontological terms, sustain in various manners and to different degrees the divides, albeit not necessarily a dichotomy, between actual and virtual, affect and cognition, and art and life. As Brian Kane in his critique of the ontological turn in sound studies already demonstrated, such a disjunction is untenable in that, firstly, the presumptively culture-free sound ontologies through their examples and analogies bespeak a cultural ground,¹⁰ and, secondly, “[w]ithout an auditory culture and the audible techniques [and I hasten to add, also bodily capacities] it employs, we cannot make sense of a great part of the world of sound studies” (Kane 2015, 15), and, I would add, any nature of sound itself, as well.

Further to this, I read this tendency to counterpose these two fields as symptomatic of the two prevailing traditions of (mis)interpreting the philosophical oeuvre of Deleuze (and Guattari), namely, one associated with Badiou (2000), and the other stemming from the work of Laruelle (2011). Whereas the former considers Deleuze the vitalist philosopher of life equated with an organic Totality, the latter molds him into the philosopher of pure difference. There being no essence of life, nor difference being essentialized, in Deleuze the primary concept is assemblage, which conversely makes of him a constructionist (and not an essentialist), and a pluralist (and not a differentialist). In ontologizing sound, the above-mentioned thinkers affiliated with sound studies, whether through the concept of the virtual, vibration or noise, appear to repeat the (naturalizing) error of the Western metaphysics of being. Disavowing this ontologizing move, I will posit that for there to be sound, sonorous assemblages must be constructed, and this constructing always happens, as I develop here, intra-actively in the middle, entangling multiple, often also nonsonorous forces, such as space, silence, duration, or intensity. Consequently, unlike in Cox’s and Hainge’s onto-aesthetic, which promulgates that works of art can expose their ontology, or Goodman’s temporal precedence of affective vibration before cognition, my metallurgical proposition—affirming co-expressive relationship between metaphysics and social critique—accounts for an ontological and singular process of simultaneously enduring sonic assembling through which both sound and a perception thereof intra-actively (i.e. perceptively) come entangled into being. Deleuze clarifies, “[W]e always have to start again, start again from the middle, to give the elements new relations of speeds and slowness which make them change assemblage, jump from one assemblage to another. Hence the multiplicity of planes on the plane, and the voids which form part of the plane, as a silence forms part of a plane of sound” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 70).

Taking as my starting point Jussi Parikka’s reminder that the materiality of media is in essence metallic (2015), I will consequently emphasize the metal’s indecomposable nature, as well as its conductivity and pliability. Given the metallic nature of Janney’s participatory visual soundworks, on the one hand, the pliable, catamorphic, and itinerant nature of metal itself, as well as its extractive “geontology” and smelting aesthetics, on the other, I will propose a metallurgical critique of airport media art, whereby the critique’s aim—in accord with Deleuze—is not to justify the status quo, but to call forth, and experiment with, untimely sensibilities. I will next diffractively examine the relationship between Janney’s airport participatory art, airport space, and the sensorium, thus micro-politically probing the boundaries of established perception, and speculating a metallurgical dimension of spatial aesthetic. Admittedly, the Janney’s sound artworks, I have selected for analysis, raise questions not only regarding perceptual complexities of the airport terminal and how the passengers aesthetically experience the surrounding space but, most importantly, concerning what happens in the middle, i.e. on the perceptive surface between virtual sonic sensations and actual bodies in the air terminal space. In effect, I will explore what novel strategies of social perception are activated and what new, singular, modes of perceiving are invented, creating alternative manners of experiencing and comprehending airspace, and thus re-politicizing aesthetic experience. I argue that the examined media artworks, integrated into the airport space, engender a nondialectical ensemble that heralds an advent of space in which airport and occupying subjects are no longer dissociated entities, and which requires empirically more radical,¹¹ and immanent an account of environmental media art.

Consequently, seeking not to decode art, but—in keeping with Deleuze’s adamant insistence on “having done with judgment”,¹² and ensuing immanent sensory pedagogy of the untimely in critical inquiry¹³—speculating (on) manners in which new styles of experiencing can be created, I will posit that when we shake the senses free from the nexus of subjective relationships that compose the specific sentience of the airport terminal space, we get engaged into a disincarnating process at work between Janney’s airport art brut and sensing bodies, which metallurgically spawns an immanent perceptive¹⁴ assemblage, thus escaping the representationally established regime, and our habituated modes, of perception. “The aim of the art,” evince Deleuze and Guattari, “is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject … to extract a bloc of sensations … A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 167). Far from being regarded as effects and subject to aesthetic judgment, Janney’s method of airport art-making and his artworks will thus be analyzed in terms of their expressive capacity for percept-extraction and deterritorialization,¹⁵ that is, metallurgical (re)connecting and resonating with the vital forces in life. In emphasizing the in-between milieu, an intensive encounter, of the airport (largely functional and habitual architecture), media artworks, and a sensing body, an eco-logical and radically empiricist account will be (re)constructed.¹⁶ Rather than a conventional analysis of selected art installations, a singular, political-aesthetic examination of (sonorous) assemblages they immanently co-construct with air terminal space and the sensorium will ensue, and I will read these dimensions diffractively,¹⁷ through one another. In consequence, what follows is far from traditional and disciplinary research into either air terminal space, Janney’s artworks, or their aesthetic experience; conversely, adapting, and building on, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of metallurgy, my objective will be to delineate how they immanently get entangled in the process of constructing singular sonorous assemblages. Sonorous assemblages are thus expressive of an immanent and micro-political aesthetic, which I designate here in terms of metallurgy, that is, an intensive play of forces that collide, between the artworks, the airspace, and a sensing body, intra-conditioning,¹⁸ -penetrating, and lacerating each other. By venturing to extract and explore intensive and singular processes which construct these sonorous assemblages, thus aesthetically stimulating a becoming-imperceptible, in the following, the essay presents an articulation of a radically empiricist and diffractive speculation on the aesthetic—metallurgical—experience of selected airport sound art as embedded into the air terminal architecture, demonstrating how it remodels the space thereof and its traditional perception. In doing so, I will develop an aesthetic of inhabiting (an airport space) without habit.

Airspace and the senses

An architectural icon of the postmodern non-lieu, shaped by a social-economic need for accelerated circulation of people and goods (Augé 1995), and subjected to the supreme rule of fast and seamless logistics, efficacious handling of data and undisturbed mobility management (Cwerner, Kesselring, Urry 2009), the airport space effectively anaesthetizes and instrumentalizes the senses (Adey 2008a; Fuller 2008; Marx 2005), which—along with atriums, terrazzo floors, endless glass walls, soaring roofs and stainless steel decor—altogether creates a generic perception thereof, bland, unappealing, and bereft of individual characteristics. In consequence, if perception in the airspace must be particularly emphasized, it is in that the complex nature of sensory experience has been systematically circumscribed through a functionalization-propelled surge of symbolic forms of comprehension expressive of the dominant utilitarian and functionalist approaches to spatial existence, as well as an optimization-fostered expansion of media technologies as its corollary. This especially concerns our capacity to perceive sound, because the more the volume and amount increases, the more time it takes for us to actually hear a sound, which again makes us more vulnerable, susceptible to manipulation, and prone to uncontrolled behavior in loud spaces. For airspaces, being sites of intensive mobility, tend to simultaneously excite powerful, often contradictory, emotions ranging from relaxation to exhilaration, panic and alienation (Hackelsberger 2004, 26), it has been pivotal for architects, spatial designers, and engineers alike to minimize this affective impact of airport space on passengers, which foremost consisted in reducing perceptual stimuli.¹⁹ Nearly paradigmatic of postmodern architecture, airport and especially its atrium, constitutes a miniature version of the city, where sonic forces of the social-political urban environment have been allayed. While designing airport terminal buildings, postmodern architects have thought more in terms of (functional) space than of (anthropological) place, thus ultimately leading to a depoliticization, and ultimately dehumanization, of traveler’s experience, and their sense of estrangement (Edwards 2005). Recognizing the dominance of such a rendering encountered in design research and policy, Degen and Rose rightly observe that experiencing is mediated by walking practices germane to a concrete locale, and “intimately intertwined with perceptual memory” thereof (2012, 3271). Concluding that “sensory urban experiencing needs to address more fully the diversity and paradoxes produced by different forms of mobility through and, perceptual memories of, built environments” (2012, 3271), however, they still prioritize the lived dimension of sensory experience (mobilized, remembered, or both) as a source of its understanding, thus remaining in the galaxy of (human) judgment of sense experience. Even though parallel research streams of affective computing (Picard 1997), or experience design (Shedroff 2001), have long accentuated sensory engagement of technology and technology-supported art users, they have tended to instrumentalize the senses as mere receptacles, thus easily prone to triggering by design features, all the while regarding sensations as largely designable. Clearly, this scholarship attributes precedence and greater power to designers and their media technologies.

Admittedly, in the present moment of heightened insecurity and control, which Paul Virilio diagnostically foresaw by equating “total peace” with “total war” (1977),²⁰ the airport lounge as part of the aerial territory becomes particularly sensitive, adequately illustrating the degree to which both individuals, societies, and their habitats have been perceptually deterritorialized, molecularized, and serialized, whose levels of complexity exceed lived experience and call for other than phenomenological accounts. Routinely perceived and defined through their constitutive function, in the hyperpostmodern era airports globally emerge as a serial edifice, apparently expressing a mathematical operation of variation with a little difference. The process of digitization, for instance, which integrates the sensory interfaces of invisible and inaudible software operations into the airport space, makes operationalization of perception and subsequent blunting of the aesthetic experience even more insidious and acute. Based on precognitive acquisition and computational analysis of sensory data, anticipatory design, and real-time monitoring (Budd and Adey 2009; Dodge and Kitchin 2011), contemporary airport code-space—having exhausted all the aesthetic joys of perception—reveals a peculiar economy premised on the perception of perception. Processing sensory information stimuli, the computerized meta-perception appears to determine the conditions of experience, thus circumscribing our aesthetic rapport to the airport surroundings on an increasingly large scale. Principally subject to a security imperative, the surveillance and sousveillance²¹ technologies of the airspace immanently reveal a terror of perception—our visceral, sensory co(d)entanglement with the machines (Wojtaszek 2017). Establishing a co-expressive continuity between airspace and sensations, such a context no longer permits a clear-cut aesthetic distinction between the concrete (things) and the abstract (sounds or images). Oddly enough, despite making each airport appear be a mere annex of the last one, and regardless of the degree of the code-based expropriation, the process of heightening the passenger experience through a propagation of computational sensory apparatuses at every step of the journey is thought to be able to (re-)create a sense of place. Interestingly, if the airport IT infrastructure cannot properly support the journey, travelers leave with a poor perception (Wattanacharoensil 2019; Wattanacharoensil and Schuckert 2015).

The advancement of digital technologies from the 1990s onwards, coupled with a general hyperaesthetic Zeitgeist of late capitalism (Howes 2005), and increasing ecological consciousness (Abram 2011), rapidly captured airport architects’ and designers’ attention, and inspired airport’s managers to initiate collaboration with artists with a view to transforming the airport transitory non-lieu into a destination. This testifies to a process of emancipation of architecture from the prevailing patterns of functionalist design of the airport space in favor of rediscovering its novel aesthetic potentials, especially enabled in conjunction with computer technologies, to stimulate and enhance discerning, sensing, and perceiving of one’s body and its connections with both the most proximate and the most remote environments. As the growing presence of various forms and modes of visual and sound art at terminal buildings worldwide demonstrates, airport can be so much more than simply a piece of global transport infrastructure, not infrequently becoming an exhibition space these days. This usually involves embedding and conveying unique spirit and vernacular traditions—whether that be, for instance, the sense-appealing immersive multimedia system at Los Angeles International Airport, gigantesque paintings of peacock’s feathers on a ceiling of Mumbai Airport, Changi Airport’s kinetic art installations in Singapore, or cow mooing and yodeling at Zurich International Airport—that render the airport far more than merely uninteresting and aesthetically indifferent a transit site. Furthermore, the immanent presence of the code in the airspace, as well as the passengers’ real-time, sensory enmeshment in it, have inspired architects, such as Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, to design structures that are automated, autonomous, and autopoietic—functioning as living “hetero-topias”, i.e. self-organizing and -differentiating spaces, capable of responding to both internal stimuli and external habitats.²² Venturing beyond the “made-to-order”—highly politicized and policed—places, contemporary airport architects²³ break with the modern airport imaginary composed of tubes as apparent extensions of the aircraft, and inspired by the natural world—like open-pit mines or canyons²⁴—introduce large, open, and meandering halls in which light can flood down to the lower levels of the construction, and sound can travel freely dissipating in all directions avoiding blockages and noise aggregation effects. Some of the airport art more than other responds sonically and optically to architecture, which—depending on a degree of originality—gives it a surreal feel, accompanied by a strangely exciting sensation of displacement and dislocation (Goetz 2002). Walking into it can feel as though one is in a movie or a phantasy, in any case an un-real world (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002). Particularly, sound technology has the capacity to engender a timespace of its own, whose effect, as Douglas Rushkoff observes, “is Dionysian: it creates a suspension of the boundaries of everyday time and space that is nearly orgiastic in character” (1994, 217–218). In this context, Christopher Janney’s sonic intervention into the otherwise generic airspace can well be considered not solely aesthetic, but also—viewed from a singular and sensory perspective as advocated by Deleuze and Guattari—(micro)political, as Peter Hall remarks, “conceived as a salve to the alienating effects of the built environment … making banal and anxiety-ridden places more pleasant” (2007). Furthermore, its being immanently incorporated into the architectural tissue of the airport makes it quite unique—it is not simply a piece of art exhibited in an airport lounge, but part and parcel thereof in, through and with which we move and perceptually interact and, inevitably, sensorially intra-act. Of foreign provenance and incongruent with the elementary function of the airspace, and yet far removed from anything unsettling or dissonant with the habitat, Janney’s environmental sound art effectively dislodges its aesthetic coherence. He states, “[A]rt in public spaces must be harmonious. My work, especially when it’s in public—transportation areas, is really about creating an oasis. It’s about being in juxtaposition to the din” (2007). By exposing passengers to exotic acoustic layers, it simultaneously has a potential to wrest percepts from lulled perception, and thus detaching travelers from the immediate urban environment. In allowing for an amplified extraperceptual experience, this sensory aesthetic encounter breaches the official convention and fabric of the space and creates a hole in the regular flow of perceptual experience—a gateway into a mine of perceptive intensity, which aesthetically conditions emergence of experimental sensory practices through which novel relations and understandings can be constructed.

It is, however, not that these sensory technologies and media art as their corollary reconstitute a customary perception of place, where their revolutionary aesthetic potential dwells. As a matter of fact, in the case of the airport, this would not even be possible, for it has never been considered thus. Indeed, conceived of either as its sheer negation—a non-place by Augé (1995), whose observations are made by nostalgically overwriting the airport with an anthropological model of place, instead of viewing it as a novel form of social and artistic creation, or a heterotopia—“counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted … outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (Foucault 1986, 24), a space of flows (Castells 2010), or yet—given its virtual, transnational tele-connectivity and nonstop communication with other spaces, as well as ultra-responsiveness to the environmental dynamic—configured in terms of a hyperreal (i.e. interobjective, heterogeneous, nonlocal, viscous, and temporally undulated) object—the kind of contemporary object whose spatial-temporal size and complex nature have exceeded traditional philosophical ideas (Morton 2013). Even though the idea of place may still hold for business and cultural politics, from an aesthetic-ecological vantage point, it no longer seems to continue to be relevant in the airport context. Deleuze and Guattari’s radically empiricist and immanent perspective, which I adapt in this meditation, cannot be further removed from the phenomenological standpoint that has defined spatial and aesthetic experience as an outcome of the design of the built environment. Eschewing phenomenological tradition and the subjective detour, and asserting original sense of aesthesis, Deleuze and Guattari postulate experience not as either sense-perception or observation-based, but as immanent, intensive, and incessant a process in sensory—connective and conjunctive—synthesis, which happens intra-actively through co-entangling (Barad 2003), only and always in the middle … it “knows only relations of movement and rest, of speed and slowness, between relatively unformed elements, molecules or particles borne away by fluxes. It knows nothing of subjects, but rather what are called ‘haecceities’” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 68).²⁵ Each journeyer thus emerges as a singular opening for perceptive encounters with the surroundings. Beneath (and before) intentionality and hasty (aesthetic) judgment, there is a micropolitical, sensorial—metallurgical—business in discerning the happening, which can be grasped and “expressed in the indefinite, but not indeterminate, articles” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 68).²⁶

Disincarnating bodies, thus fleeing from the representationally established mode of perception, and giving a body to virtual sonic percepts and affects, Janney’s airport art dispenses with an overarching idea of place by assembling sonorous spatialities that enhance perception. It is on the perceptive level that airspace and the senses converge and intra-act with each other, and Janney’s art can reach and excavate their metallurgical assemblage, which precludes a perception of airport in terms of place—be it abstract or concrete. Airport lounge emerges as an ecological space that both immerses and mines sensibilities, extracting percepts and triggering their metallurgical becoming, that is, aesthetically instigating meta-l-abor of smelting.²⁷ The relationship, however, between artworks, airport terminal space, and the sensorium is not that of causality; rather, essentially heterogenic and heterotopic, it consists in intra-active bringing together and intra-dependent conditioning, as Deleuze puts it, “Between these assemblages … there will be no causal dependence, but mutual branchings, ‘proximities independent of distance or of spatio-temporal proximity” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 83).²⁸ As such, moving us beyond the realm of representationally established perceptions, this intensive milieu—paradoxically enough—turns, indeed, into a “non-place” from which “what we see” emerges (Deleuze 1988, 38).

Towards a metallurgical approach: from extension to concatenation

What might at first sight seem to add to the existing buzz of the busy airspace, Christopher Janney’s examples of public art—seamlessly integrated into the structure of the airport space, and configured to make the space more conspicuous and appealing—in fact reduce noise level by carving out aesthetic zones of momentary sonic-visual comfort and meditation, all the while relieving stress and allaying Reisefieber. Introducing the problem of sound into the discourse on airport architecture, Janney’s artwork spatially constitutes an acoustic breakthrough and a counter to an otherwise visually fixated field. Further to this, expressing Janney’s profound interest in fusing music with architecture²⁹—“make more music like architecture, or take architecture site and put music into it, making it more alive, spontaneous”³⁰—his airport sound art significantly harnesses color, which does not simply add luster to an otherwise monotonous and monochromatic airspace, but constitutes a curious play with, and a more profound artistic travesty of, chromaticism.³¹ Bedazzling travelers, the installations explore not only our perception of space, but given their environmental character and integral oneness with the architecture of the terminal, they also intervene deeper into the nature of perception itself not to technologically extend perception,³² but to point toward, and ultimately wrong, percepts³³ that neither hastily nor easily fade into established perceptions. As Deleuze puts it, “The problem of art … is the problem of perception and not memory … Expanded perception is the aim of art” (2006, 296). Sensorially extracting sound and visual percepts, “Sonic Gates” and “Harmonic Convergence” ultimately provide us with new manners of perceiving things. Alloying together the ineffable (sound) and the concrete (space), Janney’s participatory art produces a sonorous event of in-corporeal non-coincidence,³⁴ eschewing the conventional model of perception based upon recognition. Far from privileging sense perception and manifesting a mere synesthesia in the flesh (i.e. aural picture or visual song), Janney’s innovative environmental aesthetic having sounds and colors concatenate, does not only open the musical composition mode to extraneous sounds, but essentially instigates a metallurgical process of a becoming-sound of nonsonorous matter, thus mobilizing a conjunctive dissonance of blocks of percepts in and with the milieu—a sonorous assemblage, a polyphony of polyphonies that eludes any overarching tonality.³⁵

Metallurgy is, by definition, the science of extracting metals from ores, and next modifying the metal and putting it to various uses. I retrieve an etymological sense of “metallurgy”, which in ancient Greek stands for “work (ergon) in forging connections”. This also expresses an immanent—metallic (nonhuman and environmental), and metaphysical (extraperceptual)—aesthetic that can be achieved through sensory mining, excavating, and forging. As such, the concept of metallurgy situates itself in between, and brings together, the realms of the human/mental (sensibility, science), the environmental (nature), and the social (technology). Also, it effectively dispenses with the dualism of art and crafts (technē), the latter—as Heidegger never tires of reminding us—in ancient Greek being “not only the name for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poietic” (1977, 11–12). “What metal and metallurgy bring to light”, asseverate Deleuze and Guattari, “is a life proper to matter … a material vitalism that exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and the metal the correlate of this consciousness” (2004, 454). Evading an easy classification as either a science, a technology, or a form of art (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 447), metallurgy is intended and postulated here as both an aesthetic conception of, and an immanent approach to, airport media art³⁶ that aims to give us a new mode of experiencing it (Deleuze 2006, 325). Expressing a metallic, that is intermediary, essence of sensation,³⁷ Janney’s airport art installations construct a “social foil” (Hicks 2011), which aesthetically facilitates intra-actions (Barad 2003) between people and their environments, thus stimulating an intimate co-entanglement between the urban landscape and the sensing bodies. No longer disciplining of sounds and subjugating them to the representational requirements of (spatial) functionalities, these artworks metallurgically dilute perception into nonsubjective percepts, the dinning place into a sonorous space. In letting sounds be what they are, that is singular forces, and thus ontologizing them without subsuming them under any relationship or structure—which, interestingly, for Theodor Adorno, stood for aesthetic regression that reduces a musical artwork to a simple disconnected and disorganized, anarchic, emission (2002, 38)—Janney’s airport artworks render audible the sonorous material itself without saying, representing, or reproducing anything; they become perceptively entangled into a becoming-imperceptible. Rather than leaving the auditor disharmonized, distracted, and disorientated, as Adorno would have it (Adorno 2002), communicating nothing, nor getting subsumed under any tonality, they perceptively entangle the sensorium, precluding any interpretive interval, and trigger a becoming-imperceptible, thus making bodies harmoniously resonate with ever emerging sonorous assemblages. Importantly, this operation is far from volitional; one cannot choose to be entangled, and flown, into a becoming-imperceptible. Conversely, it is totally in-voluntary-one is always already en route, between, in the middle, co-entangled, “more and more restrained, more and more simple, more and more deserted, and for that very reason populated” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 22). Constituting a peculiar presence at odds with the conventional function and image of the airport space, Janney’s art installations challenge our habituated modes of perceiving by creating in the urban environment a sense of singular proximity,³⁸ immediacy, and spontaneity. Importantly, however, this aesthetic event does not proceed by making a spectacle, neither by telling a story; breaching all narrativity, Janney’s “aereal” event expresses an immanent—discrete and delicate—sensorial metallurgy, which makes bodies sense, immerse into, and ultimately become-imperceptible. Insofar as Janney’s spatial installations create sonorous passageways enveloping us, thus introducing a sonic “view” from everywhere, they resonate with John Cage’s famous pronouncement that “[e]verything you do is music and everywhere is the best seat”. What they recall is Cage’s groundbreaking piece 4’33” for piano, where the pianist sits at the keyboard, periodically turns a page, and after four minutes and thirty-three seconds gets up and bows down to the audience. Akin to Cage’s performed silence, intended to sensitize our hearing to a traditionally nonmusical, albeit sonic, matters, Janney’s airport art—chromatically weaving together diverse sonic and optic percepts—constructs a sonorous assemblage, oddly absent but everywhere in the landscape, with a singular sensible syntax that requires new ears. “There is no absolute ear; the problem is to have an impossible one—making audible forces that are not audible in themselves” (Deleuze 2006, 160).

“Sonic gates”, or a percept-mining milieu

Contemporary airports belong to the best funded and invested, advancing sectors of economy in western countries and beyond. They continue to emerge, grow, systematically undergoing comprehensive revitalization, modernization, and privatization. Consequently, their status and social significance change—no longer peripheral, immanently integrated with cities, airports not infrequently become a paramount condition of urban development, which in turn determines their innovation and allows for a level of techno-aesthetic experimentation greater than in other public spheres. Geographically constructed in the middle, in between the city and countryside,³⁹ in global economy the airport has emerged as a virtual center of the city, a vibrant condition of its growth, and an inspiring model for its future expansion (Kasarda and Lindsay 2011). From an anthropological vantage point, the airport occupying what—in keeping with the dominant dualistic tradition of thought—appears an empty ground or an ontological hiatus between the concrete reality of land and the abstract virtuality of flight, can indeed be regarded as a holey space—architected with structural gaps, corridors, subterranean passageways, stem openings, labyrinthine passages, open jet bridges and walkways, gates, baggage handling systems, ventilation outlets, wall openings in luggage conveyors, traveler’s body cavity search—transterritorial portals to the outside, punctuated by continuous movements and itineraries, as well as hyperdynamic processes of communication, which altogether inextricably determines its very being. Arguably, it is the porosity and the open pits, rather than architectural airtightness or infrastructural impermeability, that conditions airport’s successful operation, which essentially consists in constructing bridges and connecting. As such, airport emerges as a milieu of multifarious and multilayered extraction—of passengers, of data and information, from one’s spatial belonging and social-cultural adherence, from the physical location—an “excavatory” and transformational space, par excellence. “Every mine is a line of flight”, pointedly remark Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 455).

Mining is an activity deeply embedded in, and intertwined with, environment perceptions that unite humans and their natural milieu. Due to their geological properties and social-economic functions, mines are located afar from the everyday activities, which aesthetically re-maps and cognitively re-signifies them—alike airports—into a hinterland zone of intensive perceptual experimentation and increased symbolic importance.⁴⁰ Janney’s “Sonic Gates” perfectly fits into this initially unobvious “minesthetic” of the airport terminal. Installed at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, an example of environmental and participatory art, it aptly grasps the mine-like and connective nature of the interstitial airport milieu and the ambulatory condition of its participants. Seeking to make art part of everyday life, Janney creates an urban musical instrument through a sonic-optical transformation of the vestibule—surrounded by colored glass panels and equipped with photosensors which, interacting with people’s movements, trigger a soundscape composed of voices and music. Artistically transformed, the airport gate—an intensive milieu of passing through, connecting inside and outside, does no longer just separate nor supplement; rather, it immanently elongates the varied kinds of spatial dimensions, co-entangling them and constructing a material continuum between the environmental, the technical, the sensory, and the social. Designed with an intention to bathe rushing travelers in a sonic ambiance and colored shadows, and award them a moment for reflection and relaxation in an otherwise densified and tensed space, “Sonic Gates” unexpectedly and momentarily extracts them from their regular sensory routine and perceptively immerses into a deeper stratum of aesthetic experience. Downward into the imperceptible—Janney’s work seems to announce—is the only way forward. Creating an aesthetic zone of imperceptibility by mining deep into worldly sensibility, and extracting singular percepts from quotidian perceptions, “Sonic Gates” escapes representational perception not simply by allowing us to “see sound and hear color” (Hall 2007), but, vitally, through excavating a sonorous matter that aesthetically makes us involuntarily segue into a disincarnate and dissonant assemblage. Imperative to remember at this point is that beneath the perceivable materials (e.g. glass, steel), and devices (panes, loud speakers, panels, cables, sliding door tracks, etc.), there lies the deeper aesthetic, yet imperceptible—mineral and metallic—reservoir of iron, silicon, coal, copper, etc., which in conjunction with human sensibility metallurgically, renders architecture alive and “makes it dance”.⁴¹ Architecture, unlike in Goethe’s view, is not “frozen music”; “Sonic Gates” extracts the inherent sonority of architecture. As a sensory mine, it is a “source of flow, mixture, and escape” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 455). Aesthetically immersing into an assemblage of ever-changing fields of colors and all-time running collage of sounds, participants-miners extraperceptually descend into, and extract, a deeper environmental metaphysics of coloring sensation and metallic affect. Rather than emit or bear a sound, and in lieu of displaying or projecting an image, “Sonic Gates” performs them by wresting sonic and optic percepts from aural and visual perceptions—we move from perception (the corporeal) to action (the in-corporeal). This aesthetic segue, expressive of esprit de corps, is a becoming, passing from one sonic and optic percept to another in the sensory unfolding of, what Jean François Lyotard terms, a truly “interworld artwork” (1971, 238). In mining the riches of sensory experience, “Sonic Gates” constructs a genuinely holophonic⁴² and holographic⁴³ experience, generated through a meta-l-abor of the imperceptible, mineral processes. The “minesthetic”, engendered by the artwork, demonstrates that aesthetic forms can be dissociated from neither their spatial function, nor from the metallic materiality, altogether constructing an environmental “technergon”.⁴⁴ As such, it extracts and mobilizes our capacity to discern,⁴⁵ rather than just perceive, having us see beyond the visible and hear beyond the audible, and understand the double, co-expressive and metallurgical, in-discernible nature of all objectivity. As Deleuze puts it, “Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 112).

Including as diverse sound-scores as environmental Oklahoman sounds, snippets of jet aviation, recitatives by Walter Kronkite, Will Rogers, Paul Harvey, James Garner of historical facts related to Oklahoma, and short musical compositions, played randomly by a computer each and every time the door opens, “Sonic Gate” offers a combined experience of colored glass, which altogether expresses a work of widened chromaticism, of which Deleuze and Guattari speak in regard to music’s intimate and immanent relationship to metallurgy in the introductory epigraph. The significance of the term is, however, no longer restricted to the field of music alone; rather, extracting the literal sense, it comes to designate an opening to the outside that brings foreign elements into the existing mode or work. As such, chromaticism expresses an intensive space of perceptive encounter between sound and color—their co-expressive alloy, of expressly metallurgical nature. No longer exclusively circumscribed to the conventional field of music, sound is an in-corporeal event; “sound is an invisible color”, states Janney.⁴⁶ In fleeing the established scales by creating transversal intervals, and in having color and sound meet halfway and abdicate some of their actuality, “Sonic Gates” disincarnates bodies and metallurgically triggers their chromatic, transmodal, becoming, becoming-other—a transcoding.⁴⁷ As Deleuze and Guattari observe, “Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding between milieus” (2004, 355). Accidentally altering melodic compositions, as well as playing with light, color and sound, Janney’s artwork molds an immanent sensible orifice out of perception’s extraneous forces—a sensory mining milieu that hijacks participants on a peculiar stationary flight into a becoming-imperceptible. Rather than harmonize multiple senses in a new way, “Sonic Gates” proliferates and singularizes sensory experience through creating a sonorous assemblage that chromatically elongates our perceptual experience. Breaking with the musical tradition of composing specifically for the airport lounge,⁴⁸ Janney’s musical machine of widened chromaticism constitutes an intervention into the established spatial-architectural arrangement with an objective of making art part of quotidian life and environment. In doing so, it reminds us that “[n]ot everything is metal, but metal is everywhere” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 454).

“Harmonic convergence”, or aesthetic meta(l)morphoses

Another, perhaps even more dramatic and visceral rendering of such immanent chromaticism, is Janney’s “Harmonic Convergence”—an astonishing, vividly polychromatic and multimedia installation, commissioned for Miami International Airport. Janney has sound and color converge upon each other to create an environmental resonant assemblage—expressing a sonic portrait of Florida and a pleasing spatial experience for rushing passengers. The sound-score includes a plethora of natural sounds of Florida, such as thunders, tropical birds, sea waves, scuba diving, interspersed with percussion instruments. Consisted of over one hundred and fifty transparent shades of colors placed on diamond-shaped glass panes, the artwork interacts with people’s movement through the passage. Equipped with two cameras at both ends and multiple motion sensors, it reacts to the pedestrians’ presence, changing the intensity and the tune of music playing in the background. The installation is made from different color squares, which are placed diagonally, replicating the metal structure. Unlike the “Sonic Gates”, where the sounds freely travel through the sliding doors, “Harmonic Convergence” brings them into a paradoxical—both architecturally enclosed and perceptually open—canyon space,⁴⁹ interlaced by colorful layers, resembling cascading rock strata built of various minerals, tinted by the inherent metals’ ionizing effects, which altogether engenders an impression of walking into a kaleidoscopic canyon. Morphing into singular shapes and colors, canyons are that which remains after mining subtraction of metallic ores, minerals, or a hole in the land made by natural erosion, exhibiting a convergence—immanent geo-metallurgy—of the metallic layers upon layers. Sounds travel through the canyon of “Harmonic Convergence” in a cascading manner,⁵⁰ rustling through the space and interweaving with color percepts, thus creating a new spatial version of the sublime.

As such, Janney’s sound art installations clearly defy the opposition between the functional (technical) and the aesthetic (sensory), expressing once again his conviction that art must be an integral part of everyone’s life. He flatly states, “I think it is important to create public art which has multiple layers. Some elements might be revealed upon an initial encounter, others will be discovered and revealed to the curious passerby over time. I am always interested, through my artwork, to allow people to interact with one another and their environment—in a sense I create public instruments which the community can play”.⁵¹ The artwork is embedded in the airspace and enfolded in its various functions. Doing justice to the architectural tradition of the Bauhaus that sought to reconcile industrial mass production (utilitarian value) with artistic spirit (aesthetic value), Janney’s airport installations prevent art from losing its social-political relevance and capacity for transforming established patterns and habits. Reuniting art and craft in the urban setting, Janney’s airport artworks—in contradistinction to traditional art forms (e.g. paintings, sculptures), often exhibited within the airport lounge—harmonize a high artistic merit with high-end functionality, thus effectively deterritorializing and de-institutionalizing the airport space, and rendering it perceptually more pleasing and inhabitable. The functional dimension passes into, and is aligned with, the aesthetic one, and vice versa, both concatenating in the spatial artwork. The title “Harmonic Convergence” announces a radically different aesthetic perspective—no longer divorced from existence and reserved for pure contemplation, art immanently expresses a metallurgical essence of the sensory, a purposiveness with a purpose of its own functioning. “Forms are only retained to set free variations of speeds between particles or molecules of sound” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 70). It is not a machine for reproducing sounds but a sounding machine that represents nothing and works by concatenating sonic and optic percepts into limitlessly new aesthetic experiences; the machine being “an assemblage of ‘proximities’ among independent heterogeneous terms” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 77). Evidently, “Harmonic Convergence” is a tube that has its architectural function of a walkway that connects parts of the airport building, however, being a milieu, an interstitial space remodeled into an artwork, it simultaneously has a singular life of its own, an aesthetic life that functions as a line of flight⁵²—an autonomous runway that hijacks perception onto a sensory journey of becoming, a becoming-(musical)smith, thus immanently engaging in a coining and molding of one’s singular aesthetic (musical) experience from the sonic percepts.⁵³ “Flesh is only the thermometer of a becoming”, point out Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 179).

This immanent aesthetic assemblage is not naturally given; it must be metallurgically constructed, that is, forged through smelting percepts from habitual perceptions, and alloying them into innovative and more complex connections. As such, Janney’s environmental installations construct a veritable smithy—both the creator⁵⁴ and participants becoming-smith in experience. Janney’s lifelong interest in constructing a harmonizing entanglement of form, color, and sound illustrates a long and venerable tradition in Western culture, harkening as far as to the fourth century BC, when Pythagoras theorized the intimately sensorial relationship between musical sounds and physical form in the Harmony of the Spheres. Even though the waves of celestial sounds, generated by the orbital motion of planets, were imperceptible to the human ear, this oddly metallic hum was believed to forge a cosmic harmony, which determined the quality of earthly existence. Worth mentioning at this point is that practically in all ancient mythologies there were gods-smiths,⁵⁵ which for centuries had various civilizations believe that metallurgy came from heavens, being a divine manifestation, or gift, on earth, thus occupying a special place amid arts and crafts, and acquiring both extraordinary symbolic significance and popularity.⁵⁶ In principle, metallurgy brings to consciousness the intensive and superfluous process of smelting and forging, that is hidden from perception; “[i]n metallurgy the operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation or transformation overspills the form” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 453). As a patron of fire and producer of arms, weapons, military equipment, but also jewelry and poetry, the god-smith used to be conventionally associated with crafting and artisanship, all the while connecting themes of power and death. Interestingly, in ancient cultures, a smith had been commonly defined as a demiurge, a public craftsman for the people,⁵⁷ until in Western tradition Plato reinterpreted it philosophically in terms of divine power of creation. From this perspective, the Christian supreme deity—creating the world through uttering words, i.e. sound vibrations—can also be subsumed under this tradition and regarded as a demiurge. Bringing together the divine and the material, metallurgy immanently carves out an unknown, interstitial space of transcendental (divine) perception.

Like smiths in the social-cultural history, participants of Janney’s airport art, are not spectators but strollers, by necessity itinerant and ambulant, always in movement and in perceptive oneness with the surrounding space, converging upon it, and metallurgically forging environmental connections with it. As an artisan, through his metallurgical artworks Janney exacerbates the existing porosity of airspace, sensorially urging the passengers to become-smith by inventing holes in their perception, that is become-imperceptible, and flee into a more vibrant, sonorous assemblage. The aesthetic process of a becoming-smith, triggered by the sonic-optical intensity of Janney’s design interventionist artworks, and coupled with a rapid motion the airspace induces, causes participants to rediscover their internal itinerancy, thus multiplying and enhancing their experience of travel. “The real voyage of discovery”, writes Marcel Proust, “consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” (1923, 418).⁵⁸ This immanently reveals a metallurgical nature of experience, making us “imagine less separate segments than a chain of mobile workshops constituting, from hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 458).

Coda: airport as a singular house

Residing in between, as Deleuze and Guattari explicate, “[s]miths may have a tent, they may have a house; they inhabit them in the manner of an ‘ore bed’ (gîte, shelter, home, mineral deposit), like metal itself, in a manner of a cave or a hole, a hut half or all underground. They are cave dwellers not by nature but by artistry they need” (2004, 456). The artworks-canyons by Janney, sensorially elongating the holey space of the airport, can thus be viewed as a kind of housing⁵⁹ milieu that immanently enshrouds us, instigating a spatial metallurgy of the senses. Far removed from representational Gestell, even further from an institution of the social flesh, a house here is that which happens in between, disincarnates and immersively environs us. “Enveloping the place’s singularity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 187), a house aesthetically enables a singular movement “[f]rom endosensation to exosensation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 185). Unlike Fredric Jameson’s nominalistic singularity that, in his view, has come to define hyperpostmodern, consumption-fixated experience of art in terms of the sole and unique idea of art (2015, 114), Janney’s singular art-house creates an immanent sensory milieu that “does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside, and renders their effect on the inhabitant perceptible” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 185–186). As an intermediary sounding membrane between inner and outer worlds, expressing, and serializing on a microscale, an architectural sense of experience, Janney’s artworks neither naturalize technē, nor do they technologize nature. Enfolding the singularity of the airspace and the sensorium, they clearly demonstrate that metallurgy as an immanent architecture of experience does not commence with flesh but with the house,⁶⁰ which—by virtue of its door and window openings—constitutes a forever provisional and dynamic milieu of sensory intra-communication and passing between inside and outside, inhabitant and habitat, exactly like the airport space on a larger scale. They are not made to (ego-logically) marvel at, but rather to inspire us to eco-logically regain harmonious rapport au milieu we are passing through. Wrapping around us, Janney’s airport artworks simultaneously encapsulate and elongate us, making us sense our sonorous resonance with the airspace. Art, Janney advocates, “cannot happen closed off, at an appointed hour”.⁶¹ Consequently, Janney’s artistic design interventions help us to remember that airport space is itself a work of artistic genius and artisanal collaboration—an “a(i)rtspace”—a milieu that is erected not only to frame and delimit space, and codify and control our bodies, but also one of innumerable manners we come to sensorially inhabit space and micropolitically creating a sustainable house for ourselves. This is where its political potential resides—it is not that Janney’s art can be judged political (or not); it lies beneath and beyond judgment; micropolitically actualizing itself through metallurgical intra-actions which are simultaneously unique and universal. In mining nonhuman, nonsubjective, deposits of experience, Janney’s metallurgical art constructs a singular house which conditions our disincarnation and makes it possible to sense sensing, thus calling for(th) a deeper environmental poetics and “archesthetics”.⁶² By creating conditions for extraperceptual communication and intrachange with the outside, Janney’s airport artworks, in effect, help us regain touch with sonic materiality which representational routine has sequestered us from. Instead of approaching an individual work of art in isolation, by enmeshing it into an evocative environment and transversally juxtaposing it with spaces and sensing bodies, metallurgy thus explores milieus of imperceptibility. By forcing us beyond our objectively fixed perceptions of both art and airspace, it micropolitically renders aesthetic experience ever more perceptively hybrid and complex. And yet in their ecological insistence upon the harmonious, Janney’s airport artworks engage in a micropolitical and involuntary sensory metallurgy, whose role consists in attending to the imperceptible subtleties of airspace all the while heightening awareness. It is not, however, as Arthur Danto observes regarding another American installation artist, Robert Irwin’s work,⁶³ about heightening awareness of art as art, “but of the dimensions and features of life that art raises to the highest powers of enhancement while remaining invisible (1999, 59). After all, art, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, “is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines … real becomings … that sweep it away with them toward the realms of asignifying, asubjective, faceless” (2004, 208). As a reception model for airport media art, a metallurgical perspective can also offer both a powerful aesthetic counterbalance to the nowadays prevailing understanding of airport experience in terms of code-driven spatial design and increasingly control-fixated and enclosed non-place of similitude and solitude, as well as a micropolitical antidote to a neoliberal capitalistic strategy of rehumanizing airport by endowing it with sense of place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Center, Poland [grant number: 2020/37/B/HS2/01185].

Notes

1. Given the material, aim, as well as philosophical framework of this article which address the sensory dimension of human existence, it is essential to make an aesthetic caveat that theoretical speculation and argumentation that are developed here are delimited by the neurotypical sensory perspective. Considerations of the spatial and aesthetic consequences of heightened sensitivity in the context of airport sensory overload lie beyond the scope of this research.

2. Some attempts have been made to manage and control audio communication in terminal buildings. Such innovative AV technologies as directional audio have recently been deployed inside major airports which channel sound by special positioning of speakers and other audio installations, ensuring that it reaches its destination, thus minimizing cacophonous effect. While interacting with either a news feed, listening to security announcements or relaxation music while waiting in a queue for the screening routine, one can hear only the dedicated audio, which eliminates distractions and unburdens a traveler.

3. Sounds above 80 dB are deemed harmful. https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/health-topics/tf4173.

4. The most lavish of contemporary airports are not solely market-driven fantasy worlds. They are also prestige projects, increasingly emerging as symbols of national pride, international position as well as playgrounds of global competition.

5. There already exist multiple fee-based soundproof solutions ranging from Napcabs at Berlin-Tegel and Munich, Yotel in Amsterdam, London and Paris, short-stay hotel chain Minute Suites in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Dallas Fort Worth and Philadelphia International Airport, and Boston-based Sleepbox, to the peculiar Jabbrrbox at a few American airports (e.g. New York’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International Airport, Pittsburgh International Airport, and Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport). The designated free quiet and snooze zones are to be found, for instance, at Singapore-Changi, Doha-Hamad, Seoul-Incheon, Tokyo-Narita, Munich International Airport, and Vancouver International Airport.

6. Manning (1996); Gordon (2004); Adey (2008b); Salter (2008); Fuller (2008); Budd and Adey (2009); Kasarda and Lindsay (2011); Schaberg (2012); Bissell, Hynes and Sharpe (2012); Groening (2013); R. Hall (2015).

7. A notable example is The Modern Airport Terminal: New Approaches to Airport Architecture by Brian Edwards, originally published in 1997 (London & New York, Spon Press, 2005).

8. An interesting case in point is Audiotechture – a Gothenburg-based, Swedish agency, founded by two interior designers: Olle Niklasson and Ake Permeruda, who experiment with natural sounds in diverse architected spaces. See http://www.audiotechture.se/home-1.html.

9. Of relevance are, amongst others: Peter Hallward’s Out of this World. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London, Verso, 2006), and Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

10. This ontologizing maneuver is also criticized by Marie Thompson who—building on the work of Franz Fanon and Fred Moten—exposes its apparent neutrality and universality as inherently anchored upon ethnocentric, gender and racialized violence which stems from established and socially shared perception. Premised upon exclusion, being of sound is shown to be historically a resultant, and generative, of “white aurality”—a dominant system of perception, which chooses to consider only “the ‘richest’ works of sound art” as exemplary (Thompson 2017, 275).

11. Here I specifically refer to phenomenological accounts of environmental art, such as—amongst others—Berleant’s (1992, 1997, 2010, 2012), which stem from, and replicate, the entrenched dualistic divide within aesthetics inaugurated by Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy that splits it into a theory of possible experience (objective contents), and a theory of art as a reflection on real experience (subjective forms). Art is thus judged from the vantage point of beholder (representation). Following Deleuze, my argument is that traditional Western aesthetic theories—resting on lived experience—are not radical enough to conceptually render the metallic nature of sensation, thus facilitating a metallurgical aesthetic. In this essay, I will propose an alternative point of view—a Pygmalion’s affective glance from the middle, an immanent aesthetic perspective that, instead of reception and judgment, stresses creation and the quest for (creating) new ways of feeling.

12. See G. Deleuze “To Have Done with Judgment” (in Essays Critical and Clinical, London, Verso, 1998, 126–135).

13. See G. Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York, Columbia University Press, 1983, 94).

14. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I distinguish here between perceptual (i.e. phenomenological perception) from perceptive (i.e. immanent, sensory, and metallurgical, percept—in a nonsubjective sense of affective and responsive).

15. These, in Karen Barad’s terms, can be respectively rendered as intra-active entangling and diffractive expansion.

16. This inevitably expresses a singular and unique experience, which naturally may differ from others. This affirmation of multiple, albeit immanent, perspectives expressive of sustaining vital relations remains is keeping with Deleuze’s pronouncement of the equivalence between empiricism and pluralism. “Every multiplicity grows from the middle”, states Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, vii).

17. In physics, diffraction designates a shift in the flow of a sound or light wave conditioned by an obstacle in its route. Inspired by Karen Barad’s political-philosophical proposition to replace reflection with diffraction derived from her account of physical optics, I will harness the diffractive reading method throughout my analysis. Rooted in empiricism and relational ontology, and elucidating “indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions and bright spots in ‘dark’ regions” (Barad 2003, 803), diffractive reading expresses Deleuze and Guattari’s political metaphysics of assembling relationality wherein openness and transversality, which amounts to Barad’s “exteriority within” (Barad 2003, 803), practically express the sense of metallurgy and enable novel insights.

18. I consequently adapt here Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-actions”, which express the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, and through which “the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful” (Barad 2003, 815). Evidently, this perspective can account for only singular experience.

19. This observation applies to the general structure and topography of the airport terminal building. There are, for instance, dedicated shopping areas where designers deliberately use concrete techniques to solicit desired consumer behavior. See Sulzmaier (2001).

20. This basically means pursuing war by other means, foremost by instilling a pervasive ambiance of insecurity through a micropolitical use of information and communication technologies and creation of statistical—surveillable and vulnerable—populations. Focusing specifically on the issue of terrorism, Reza Negarestani for his part alternatively speaks of “militarization of peace” (2007), oxymoronically drawing attention to what may seem to be a paradoxical condition of the contemporary era that evidently defies the logic of an excluded middle, “The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of Absence”, in: Collapse Volume I. Numerical Materialism, R. Mackay, (Ed.), Urbanomic, Oxford.

21. That is, surveillance from below. I pluck out the term from the work “Tracking Transience” by an American artist Hasan Elahi (2008), who develops a notion that “in the digital age more transparency is less”. In his online installation, he tracks himself across the globe, constructing an exhaustive visual archive, documenting each moment of his life-in-transit. Given that in the digital political economy secrecy has become the source of valuation, commodifying information, the more secrets about ourselves we publically divulge, he postulates, the more we devalue covertly collected information about us, http://elahi.gmu.edu/. In Hasan’s digital artwork, sousveillance stands for self-surveillance, a critical consciousness of contemporary investigative techniques. Acknowledging the repertoire of sensory and analytical capacities of contemporary media that pre-cognitively can access human and environmental sensibility in real time, I read the concept literally as expressive of immanent forensics—happening beneath (and beyond) our perceptual and conscious reach, thus essentially extraperceptual.

22. The starfish-shaped, five-pronged terminal building at Beijing Daxing International Airport, designed by the Zaha Hadid Architects Studio and completed in September 2019 serves as an adequate example.

23. For instance: Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, César Pelli, Moshe Safdie.

24. A relevant case in point is “The Canyon” terminal, an art installation by a California artist Gordon Huether, which is part of the expansion program at Salt Lake City International Airport. Spanning over 362 feet in length, the art design brings in the natural wonders of Utah inside the terminal building and reinvents the space into a quiet zone, thus creating a unique space for passenger relaxation. Read more at https://gordonhuether.com/slc-the-canyon/.

25. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Duns Scotus, haecceity denotes singularity, namely, “a mode of individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or a subject” (2004, 599). Deriving from Latin ecce (here is), haecceity expresses an entire dynamic assemblage immanently constructed in a singular and unique, albeit contingent and impersonal, manner. I posit the metallurgical to account for this singular aesthetic process of immanent construction (i.e. assembling), independent of forms and subjects (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 289).

26. Hence an aesthetic in the title of this article, which expresses this singular, and nonphenomenological, radically empiricist account of aesthesis, and—adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology—could equally be considered minor aesthetic.

27. Although, architecturally and technologically, air travel in general, and air terminal in particular, are themselves adequate examples of intensive exploitation and extraction of diverse metals and minerals, as well as continuous metallurgical processes, which sustain their operation, their socio-political and environmental aspects and ramifications constitute an independent terrain of inquiry but lies beyond the scope of this critical investigation.

28. Barad concurs, “The notion of intra-actions constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of causality” (2003, 815).

29. In doing so, he breaches the traditional Western parallelism between architecture and music—the former qualified as “petrified music”, whereas the latter perceived as “moving architecture”, and thus creating an aesthetic condition for exiting both established domains into an immanent plane of sensorially vibrant and real life, viewed as a process of sonorous construction.

30. “Sculpting Sound”, an interview with Christopher Janney by Scott Simon, Art & Design, February 24, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7584982&t=1577004946564; “Christopher Janney”, a video recording by Miami Design District, 2013, https://arts.mit.edu/artists/christopher-janney/#about.

31. Clearly, Janney’s artworks constitute a mixture of image and sound, and given the plethora of colors they bring to our perception as well as Western ocularcentrism, it could be argued that the visual dimension overshadows the aural one. Adapting Deleuze’s monistic metaphysics and its immanently expressionistic worldview, I disavow any hierarchy of the senses. Focusing upon the sonic communication of Janney’s airspace art, in this essay I consequently engage with the musical notion of chromaticism, rather than colorism, which, crucially, in Deleuze’s aesthetic philosophy, operates in a parallel fashion in the field of painting. See Deleuze (2005).

32. As such, Janney’s environmental artworks will be viewed in contradistinction to Neil Harbisson’s cyborgian art, https://www.cyborgarts.com/. Renowned for having an antenna implanted in his skull that allows him to perceive visible and invisible colors via audible vibrations including infrareds and ultraviolets, Harbisson—officially recognized as a cyborg—illustrates McLuhanian humanistic conception of media technologies as extensions of the senses (i.e. making abstraction concrete). Conversely, Janney’s art installations capture how sonic and optical percepts detach from the persons, places and forms under which they have been subsumed (i.e. flying into abstraction), thus expanding perception. Seeking to artistically elaborate a complex environment, they extract and concatenate the nonhuman percepts and non-sound forces, thus making perceptible that which is not perceivable in itself.

33. I will follow Deleuze and Guattari who posit that percepts are “independent of a state of those who experience them” (1994, 164).

34. I allude here to Brian Massumi’s observation that whilst in motion, a body never coincides with itself (2002, 4).

35. In his profound critique of Western musical tradition, Daniel Charles traces our specific desire for tonality in musical compositions and exposes a cultural link between tonal system and functionality (primacy of form or structure), which has subjugated sounding material and made it subservient to sensus communis and its socially established perceptions of space and time. This leads him to distinguish between functional and floating music that affirms sound immanent production, unyoked to any transcendent principle, forcing us to think of music differently. See “La musique et l’oubli”, Traverses No. 4, 1976, 14–18.

36. Though it may seem that the metallurgical approach prioritizes technē and conditions art upon it, this actually considers art as technē’s immanent mode of expression, a machinic part of our inhabiting of the world. Art is machinic/technical through and through, which interestingly retrieves the ancient meaning of the term—in Sanskrit denoting “manner, mode”, and in Greek “prepare, fit together”, and which the etymological proximity between art and arms additionally illustrates.

37. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue, “Metal is neither a thing nor and organism, but a body without organs” (2004, 454), thus excavating a properly metallic—connective and intermediary—nature of sensation. It belongs to both, but in a sense to neither—always in the making, it is in the middle. Earlier on, they write, “[W]hat is intermediary is autonomous, initially stretching itself between things, and between thoughts, to establish a whole new relation between thoughts and things” (2004, 450).

38. In the Deleuzian sense of voisinage, which used to describe the position of singularities in terms of transversal intersection. Far from mimesis or resemblance, the concept of voisinage expresses indiscernibility and indefiniteness, in other words, a sensory becoming.

39. In congruence with Deleuze’s monistic ontology, airports—akin to grasslands (i.e. European steppe, North American prairie, South American pampas or African and Australian savanna) that grow between forests and deserts and historically have proven the most existentially adaptable, inhabitable and cultivable space—constitute a social-technical and architectural parallel, occupying the space in between cities and countryside, an intermediary milieu of intensive communication, exhibiting a high degree of formal-material pliability and openness to technological experimentation. As a site of passage, airport can thus be viewed as deterritorializing. See Deleuze, Guattari (2004, 68); Deleuze and Parnet (2006, 31, 134–135).

40. The discovery of mines naturally creates novel experiences, changing the environmental aesthetics, which is accompanied by an emergence of new mythical and symbolic narratives that replace the existing ones. I will address this symbolic dimension in the following section of the article by discussing the frequent cultural association of metallurgy with divine creation, which is illustrated by the presence of gods-smiths in various mythologies. As such, mines and metallurgy situate in the liminal space that entwines the abstract with the concrete.

41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2XXiK9u2_I.

42. Holophonic sounds are digitally processed, immersive audio recordings that create an aural impression of the listener being in intimate proximity to the emitting source. It is noteworthy that sound is in nature holophonic, but Western tradition has appropriated and used it by reducing it to a linear form and thus adapted it to human ends (i.e. ordering). This has precluded access to, and sensory pedagogy and experiential work with, higher vibrational sonorities. Electronic media has yielded production of holophonic music, which historically comes after the paradigms of monophony, polyphony and homophony, defining the musical texture of contemporary era that began roughly in the 1950s. See Kokoras (2005). Further to this, interestingly, in cosmogonies of many cultures (e.g. Hindu, Christian, Islamic) sound vibration is deemed a source and a means of creation. Constructing a sonorous assemblage beyond phenomenological stereophony, Janney’s artworks perform an extrapolation and expansion of sound (viz. sonic vibration) into its spherical, multidimensional and infinite force, which restores connection with holophonic percepts, thus approximating to transcendental (divine/creational) perception.

43. Being a technical procedure of light diffraction, a hologram cannot be properly considered an image; rather it expresses performance that reveals a process of emergence of the image. As such, through a metallurgically constructed proximity between sound and color, Janney’s artwork forges a whole living environment that perceptively moves and changes along with us, making us sense that perceptions are one-off, singular, creations and not reproducible forms of regularity.

44. That is, artwork as a composition of technē and ergon.

45. From Latin discernere, which denotes “distinguish, separate, divide off”.

46. https://www.janneysound.com/project/invisible-color/.

47. Inspired by Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transduction, Guattari’s transcoding expresses immanent becoming that is asubjective and environmental, an intensive process that happens in the middle, co-entangling the elements that construct an assemblage which they never leave unchanged (1979, 117–153).

48. Exemplary is Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”, composed in 1978, briefly played at La Guardia Airport in New York in the 1980s, considered today an important achievement in ambient music. Another, more recent, example of such a specifically airspace-inspired and -dedicated sound artwork is “Airport Symphony” composed by eighteen artists in 2007. Expressive of a personal meditation of various dimensions of air travel, the series is intended to stimulate journeyers-listeners to hear the noise of air travel differently.

49. Etymologically, the term “canyon” derives from an augmentative of a Spanish noun cano, which denotes “tube”. Moving away from the patterns of pipes, corridors and stairs, customarily associated with aviation, modern airports, for example: Daxing in Beijing, Changi in Singapore, Incheon in Seoul, or Abu Dhabi airport, are more and more frequently inspired by this natural, geological formation, which illustrates a process of gradual re-naturalization of airport spaces (e.g. adoption of waves, spirals, and spherical solutions in design) that traditionally have been perceived as constructions of pure artifice—combining layers of synthetic materials, artificial lights, and cube-like design.

50. Aside from hyperpostmodern airport architectural design and art that draw considerable inspiration from natural canyons, contemporary geo-architecture explores the aesthetic potential of intertwining human-made music with the natural setting of canyons, providing curious illustrations, for instance, Chapel of Sound—a concert hall built in a canyon, north of Beijing in China; a concert hall in Al Ula in Saudi Arabia, constructed among rock canyons.

51. https://www.janneysound.com/project/urban-musical-instruments/.

52. Deleuze cares to remind that flight is far from feeling from life into the imaginary or art; conversely, “to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 36).

53. In their plateau “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—the War Machine”, Deleuze and Guattari discuss a cultural history of the smith as workers in metallic affects (A Thousand Plateaus 2004, 456), which supplies an adequate illustration for my immanent and metallurgical account of aesthetic experience in airport sound art.

54. Working liminally, in between the disciplines, i.e. architecture and music, and creating urban musical instruments, Janney emerges as a metallurgist, or smith—an artisan, par excellence.

55. For instance: Hephaestus in Greek mythology, Vulcan in Roman myths, Brigid in Celtic mythology, Svarog in Slavic myths, Kagu-tsuchi in Japanese mythology, or dwarfs in Norse mythology.

56. Given its prevalence in naming in most Anglophone cultures, as well as in the ones with rich mining traditions such as German (“Schmied”), or Polish (“kowal”), “smith”, usually anteceded by an equally popular first name, has become generic to convey the meaning of an average man, or someone wanting to conceal his identity. Significantly, following the Latin tradition, the term “smith” has also come to express moral agency, a creator of one’s own existence (“Faber est suae quisque fortunae”).

57. From Greek demos (“common people”) and ergon (“work”).

58. Original quotation: “Le seul veritable voyage … ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux”.

59. The term “house” etymologically refers to hiding, which adequately expresses the hidden—imperceptible—life proper to matter, which Janney’s environmental art animates, whereas the concept of metallurgy captures heuristically.

60. I allude here to Deleuze and Guattari’s intriguing pronouncement in What Is Philosophy? (1994, 186) that “[a]rt begins not with flesh but with the house”.

61. “Sound Artist Christopher Janney Makes Music for the Public Arena”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2XXiK9u2_I.

62. Remaining in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari who claim that “architecture is the first of arts” (1994, 186), this play on words retrieves the etymological origin of architecture, which stems from Greek arkhi (“builder, crafter”, one who plans and contrives).

63. Not infrequently, near-to-imperceptible itself, Irwin’s art practice is expressive of a function of the environmental circumstances, and thus designated as “conditional art”.