PneumoMachinic: Air as Sound, Air as Breath

Three works of sound art from international artists working at the intersection of art and technology

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PneumoMachinic at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, BC presents three works of sound art from international artists working at the intersection of art and technology. On view until Aug. 18, the “breath machines” explore the necessity and hauntings of air across various forms, currents and time periods.

Turkish artist Ali Miharbi’s Whispering 1 isolates the primal sounds that emanate from the human vocal tract. Miharbi accomplishes this feat through a series of 3D-printed acoustic resonators, which look like red plastic tubes that rest horizontally on mic stands across the gallery floor. Each resonator is cut differently to reconstruct the human vocal tract, articulating whispers, glottal stops, and other breathy utterances. One tube had a cap and was cut more deeply so that when the cap was triggered, it sounded the consonant “k.” An air of conspiracy gradually emerges as the sounds verge on becoming whispers.

Miharbi’s work reminded me of a collection of poetry, Lanterns at Guantanámo, by Jordan Scott and Jason Starnes. In 2015, Scott was granted a five-day visit to the Guantanámo Bay Detention Centre. He was under constant supervision but was able to make field recordings and take notes and photographs. Scott pushes the envelope on listening as witness: how does one listen to state-produced sound and silence? The result, a composition by Starnes, is a tense and atmospheric exercise in listening.

Much like Scott’s and Starne’s work, Miharbi’s Whispering 1 exists at the threshold of whisper and breath, conveying a sense of urgency and claustrophobia. 

Cristhian Ávila Cipriani’s El Etorno Retorno reproduces pre-Hispanic musical instruments drawn from his ancestral heritage. Using the technology of MRI scans, a variety of flutes were scanned and 3D-printed with ceramic materials. At the Museo de Arte de Lima, a windmill was built for this exhibition. The wind data collected at the museum in Lima, Peru, is sent live to the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, powering a pneumatic pump, causing the simulated instruments to sound in such a way that the air is made audible. 

The 3D-printed flutes are elegantly arranged in a circle around the electronics. With the transference of wind data, a splitter switch goes off and triggers a flute, creating breathy whistles that remind me we are conditioned to perceive what counts as melody, as music. El Etorno Retorno is symphonic in its interconnected loops of air. Like loggerhead sea turtles and Monarch butterflies who are magnetically drawn to the places of their birth even after lifetimes of migration, where does our breath and our music return to? In Cipriani’s art, air is the medium that is recuperated through sound. 

Organismo or Organscape by Spanish artist Xoán Xil comprises nine robotic bellows-driven resonators placed at ground level. A series of mini machines with accordion-like lungs, Organscape is a layered work of sound art that draws inspiration from ornithology studies, poetry, and research into organs from the Baroque period. 

The first phase of Xil’s research resulted in a composition entitled Variaciones para el Rei-Lúa, inspired by The Assassinated Poet by Guillaime Apollinaire, in which the author reimagines his encounter with Luis II of Bavaria, who, confined in a cave, played an organ to reproduce the various sounds of the world such as street sounds, trams, elephants, geysers, bells, birds, and dogs. Xil similarly tries to replicate natural sounds like bird calls, activated by air from different bellows.  

I first heard Organismo when I was in the adjoining room. It sounded like cellphones ringing raucously or birds I’ve never seen engaged in a mating dance. The gallery attendant said that Organismo shouldn’t have gone off because it is activated by a motion sensor and there was no one else in the gallery with me at that time. Obviously, I thought of ghosts and glitches. What are ghosts and glitches if not the persistence and eruption of another world and time in ours? Just as Luis II of Bavaria tried to replicate the sounds of the world in his cave, Xil emulates paramusical sounds like birds and thunder, pushing the mechanism of the organ to its limits, only to regenerate new sounds not traditionally associated with organs. The result is a playful and haunted cacophony.

PneumoMachinic is a welcome reminder that the air we take for granted is a foundational element of sound and life itself. ■

PneumoMachinic is on view at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, BC until Aug. 18.

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