The Theatre of the Air/ AIRSPACE ACTIVISM=ENACTING THE INVISIBLE
is a set of 2 exhibitions – in London and Newcastle
it is the fruit of the collaboration in between geography researcher Dr Alison J Williams and Interactions designer Nelly Ben Hayoun
Where beats this Human Heart/ Space in Between
Exhibition runs 19/06/10 ‐ 23/06/10
The Bunker
@ The Print House
18 Ashwin street
London E8 3DL
A disused WWII air raid shelter in Dalston, East London, is the backdrop for the exhibition. Inside the passages and chambers of this dark and cavernous subterranean, 5 artists have created a spectacle of sensory and experiential overload.
Use an audio locator to spot the planes coming!
Interventions/ Newcastle University
Exhibition runs 28th June- 2nd July
The Exlibris Gallery
The Quadrangle
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
Who owns the airspace above our heads? How can we take back control of these spaces? What is the extent of the airspace we can control?
Nelly Ben Hayoun (Interactions designer) and Dr Alison J Williams (geography researcher) met through the Interventions Project, an initiative based in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. This venture teamed for 8 weeks designers with social scientists to develop innovative ways of commenting on their academic research.
One of the outcomes of Nelly and Alison’s collaboration is the ‘Theatre of the Air’. This project is based on Alison’s research into the geographies of UK military airspaces. These spaces are hidden zones of military control and power projection. They are used by UK military air forces to train and prepare for combat situations. The idea behind this project is to creatively use interviews conducted with a number of UK military pilots and navigators to think through how these spaces are performed. At the heart of these interviews was a concern to uncover the hidden geographies of military airspaces through discussions on how these users perceive and imagine the complex geometries of the spaces through which they fly. The research considers how this renders airspace as a theatre, both in the military and the performing arts sense. It focuses upon excavating the mechanical and human elements of aviation and how they enact individual airspaces.
The ‘Theatre of the Air’ presented by Space in Between in London 19_23 June is only one part of Nelly and Alison’s wider Interventions Project work.
The full exhibition, to be staged at Newcastle University from 28th June – 2nd July will focus on the ‘Airspace Activism’ aspect of their work. Come to see the 4 meters high windfarms!
This work develops the idea that through the use of personal wind farms, individuals can create radar white noise and prevent aircraft flying overhead, therefore reclaiming their piece of sky. The audio-locator provides an early warning device thus enabling the wind farm to be set in motion in time to deflect the incoming aircraft.
Context
This project is based on research into the geographies of UK military airspaces. These spaces are hidden zones of military control and power projection. They are used by UK military air forces to train and prepare for combat situations. One of the fascinating things about these airspaces is that they exist in four dimensions; they are three-dimensional volumes of space that can be activated and deactivated at different times. However, aviators only have two-dimensional air charts to look at to ‘see’ these spaces, so they have to be able to translate these mappings into three-dimensions in their minds in order to be able to safely fly through them.
The idea behind this project is to creatively use interviews conducted with a number of UK military pilots and navigators. At the heart of these interviews was a concern to uncover the hidden geographies of airspaces through discussions on how these users perceive and imagine the complex geometries of the spaces through which they fly, and whether they have an instinctual ability to generate three-dimensional images in their minds. These interviews illustrated how airspaces are enacted through the movement of aircraft through them. The research considers how this renders airspace as performed, with the mechanical and human elements of aviation enacting individual airspaces. The foci of this project are therefore on making these invisible spaces visible to a broad audience, to make this expert knowledge more widely accessible to a non-expert audience, and to illustrate the performances that enact airspaces.
Enacting the invisible
This project seeks to make these invisible airspaces visible. It achieves this through the construction of a vertical object that empowers us to enact control of these spaces.
During the early years of aviation aircraft flew at a relatively low altitude. However, laws existed that gave land-owners ownership of the entirety of the vertical space above the footprint of their house, including the air. This led to a myriad of problems for aviators and landowners who became locked in battle over payment for access to these spaces.
More recently, wind farms have become a contentious issue. Environmentalists either protest their building in areas of natural beauty, or cry out for their erection to reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The aviation community dislikes wind farms because they create no fly-zones in the sky, because of their production of radar white noise, which prevents aircraft flying over them.
This project synthesises these ideas, proposing an activism approach the focuses upon the idea of being able to generate and enact your own airspace though the deployment of a personalised wind farm. This creates a form of mechanical imperialism, through the enablement of the control of an individual airspace. The project involves the creation of both the wind farm and an audio locator that amplifies the sound of an aircraft engine, thus developing a focus upon an augmented reality which is enacted through the enabling of the wind farm owner to hear an aircraft at distance and erect the wind farm in time to prevent the aircraft flying overhead. Can airspaces be owned and activated by the public? What is the size of the airspace you can own? How can we employ wind farms in a way that disrupts conventional understandings of their use?