'Acts of Air' invites you to reshape your urban sonic present by enacting 14 sound works directly in urban spaces. Each work proposes a sounding out, a performance, a site specific listening or engagement in the streets, under bridges, by water fountains and extractor fans. They offer a variety of means to explore and interrogate our cities of sound.

While the urban is a seemingly fixed and impermeable place, the urban sonic is in the air, performed and enacted each day as we ride the buses, press the buttons and talk to one another. With these vibrations we can choose to re-voice, re-sound, re-hear and rebuild the urban sonic in new ways.

This online exhibition brings together artists from around the world. While the works are shaped by the sites and locations they were made in, including Porto Alegre, Santiago, Manchester, Melbourne and Cairo they can be enacted and activated anywhere around the globe. Through local participation the audience as performer can sound out the artists’ provocations and create new engagements with their own local urban. From global participation we can reveal our shared and different conditions of urbanity – the opportunity to hear new possibilities and togetherness through documentation, participation and trace of these art works.

Online exhibition, offline participation

Prepare

This online exhibition is the score, the prompt. Take time to read about the artworks, what they need of you and where they need to be sited.

Select

Select an artwork to enact. Each work explores a different facet of the urban environment, using different sonic strategies.  Each work has a different location and duration. Some are for individuals, others for groups. Some are loud and public, others quiet and internal. 

Enact

Go out into your local urban environment, anywhere around the world, and enact the artworks. Your urban is the gallery, the stage. You are the audience to your own performance.

Trace

Leave a trace of your experience on our instagram channel. Document the work as you make it, where you made it, how you made it. Co-create a global urban sonic together from our traces.

But first ...

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Our urban sonic present

By Lisa Hall

Over half the world’s population live in urban environments, from small towns to mega cities that house more than 10 million people each. Within the next decade urban inhabitation will increase to two thirds of the global population - the urban is our main habitat. But in many ways our construction of the urban falls short of our needs, it’s design and shaping not always inline with the wants of its inhabitants. While the built urban environment is often thought of as fixed and impermeable, the urban sonic is only partially fixed down. It is in the air, performed and enacted each day as we ride the buses, press the buttons and talk to one another. The urban sonic relies in part on our participation - to be turned on, to be sounded out, to be heard or voiced in specific ways. It requires something from us. This relational basis of the urban sonic leaves space for individual agency. It provides opportunity to push and pull a little at what this urban is - in our ears and on the streets around us. 

This exhibition explores urban sites, conditions and strategies of sound, in order to remake the urban sonic in the moment. These relational artworks for individuals or small groups, require only a mobile phone and a few simple items. 

Many of the artworks explore the sounds and sites of the built environment that are seemingly fixed, where the structures are set and the sounds of matter making contact with matter seem so unchangeable. But the space for change comes in the form of our perception and listening, in our adherence to the teachings of how to hear, if to hear and what to make of it all. A number of the artworks explore these boundaries - gently loosening the rules of listening. Catherine Clover’s score offers an undoing of the filters of hearing - by not excluding or separating sounds based on species or liveness, inner or outer voice. Jacek Smolicki’s participatory project sets up a system to bypass expectation, by taking us to an unknown suburb where we can make new meaning from what we hear. Colin Priest’s participatory project asks us to connect with the built environment, in both our understanding of it’s functioning and in how we articulate this. Agnes Paz’s sound walk invites a reconnection to water, an essential component of the urban that is often unheard and redirected out of sight and sound. Yara Mekawei’s sound work highlights how listening can reveal the social history of a site, as well as how certain types of listening can be prohibited, only granted to the few. 

The urban sonic is also made up of the sounds of us - of our voices and sonic gestures made as we inhabit these spaces. The voice and body are the seemingly unfixed sounds of the urban, ones that move and choose if to sing or shout. But they too are fixed by rules, of custom, culture, society, fashion, technology and law. The rules of audibility dictate what can and should be said, who can or can’t speak, when the non-verbal is allowed, and what gestures or other sounds we can make. Many of the artworks carefully sound out these boundaries, challenging them or re-writing them: Anna Raimondo’s audio intervention provides the means for you to address issues of gender through your choice of words; Vitório O. Azevedo’s audio tour gives a new voice of authority to public spaces; Vagnés sound work shares revolutionary voices from anti-racism movements; Kate Brown’s work gives opportunity for non-verbal expression in shared resonance with the architecture around us; Julieanna Preston’s live performance invites vibration with the urban to find new connections with this matter; Cédric Maridet's group performance invites exploration of how we can sound together differently, taking a lead from birds, and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.

And of course the rules of the urban, sonic or otherwise, can change entirely and at speed. Protests are currently sweeping the globe, drastically reshaping the urban sonic - transforming, disrupted and turning it into something else so quickly. The exhibition also falls at a time of unprecedented global change due to the COVID-19 global pandemic and lock down. Isolation demanded that transport and services stop - vehicles, trains and planes, engines, shops and restaurants ceased, human activity relocated to the home. The city of sound was no longer built the same way each day, instead a new urban sonic present was made from this changed usage. This COVID time has uniquely demonstrated how the urban sonic is reliant on our participation, how fragile it’s construction is, and how it can suddenly become unfixed and fade away. Many of the artists’ works contain traces of this COVID sonic present, while some focus entirely on it: Raheel Khan’s participatory work specifically explores this moment of change, asking you to imagine what else could be; Vagné’s work reflects upon the situation of coping with lockdown in areas of high density living; and Colin Priest’s project draws parallels between the ventilators for bodies and the ventilators of the urban - both servicing different lungs. While Anna Lann’s sound work explores the idea of an unfixed urban sonic, not in relation to the conditions of COVID, but in response to an environment that was simply lacking - building her own self generating sonic worlds from zeros and ones.

However, while the urban sonic can change in a moment, the bounding rules of audibility can also solidify when pushed. Some aspects of the urban sonic can simply be unmovable, can have no flexibility, no space for gentle maneuvering or for small changes. Yara Mekawei’s work captures an edge of these limits, heard in her recordings captured through a scarf. It is in these vibrations that the fixed stays fixed and we feel the limits of our agency. 

This exhibition playfully explores the urban sonic present, surveying what it is, and simultaneously exploring how we can effect change to it right now, through sound. The works employ a range of sonic strategies, of alternative participation, re-voicing, re-hearing and re-sounding. The exhibition brings together artworks made in different urban conditions and locations around the world, to find where homogeneity starts and ends, how different geographic and cultural factors create different possibilities, and how all of this could inspire us. Participation brings these works to life, as both artworks and demonstration of our possibilities to rebuild the urban sonic in new ways.

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