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

Disclosure statement

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

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”.

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].