Output details

Air Pressure

Research questions.This research sought to analyse and question conventional paradigms and measuring mechanisms of acoustic science by rendering categories of aircraft ‘noise’ in terms of the sensory perception of a culturally particular environment. It asked how vulnerability factors to noise effects are created through social and political relations by describing the daily ‘lived experience’ of one family farm located at the end of the main runway inside Tokyo’s Narita international airport. Methodology The work is based on a collaboration between artistic and scientific practices of listening to and representing sound so as to create an ethnography that is sensory by design. Noise data was converted into forms of description through making sound recordings and shooting film and by creating an immersive gallery installation where this material could be played back through a multi-channel, multi-screen system. The audio-visual design aimed to engage the gallery going public with the ways in which the matter of air as frequency, vibration and intensity becomes an affective geography of political and social relations.Dissemination: The work was exhibited at the Whitworth Art Gallery, as part of the 2011 Asia Triennial; the Ethnographica Terminalia exhibition held as part of the 2012 American Anthropological Association meetings; and the IX Media Art Monographic Show 2013 (Colombia); it was accepted for competition in electronic arts festivals at ISEA 2012 (one of 50 works from 1500 entries) and Bideodromo 2012 (one of 69 works from 467 entries). In November 2013 it will be exhibited at an art-show in the Haus für elektronische Künste Basel and then enter their permanent collection. In Japan in 2013, the work was exhibited in the Narita Cultural Hall and Okinawa museum of art and history and interviews with Cox about this were published in the Mainichi Shinbun Okinawa Times and Ryukyu Shinpo newspapers.