Jutta Ravenna
Air Circles (2024)
multichannel kinetic sound installation

Technical team: Thomas Sommer, Peter Färber, Nico Daleman and René Henry
Funded by inm – initiative neue musik

Due to the oxygen cycle, we exist in a terrestrial ship. Air Circles draws on German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century research into how our senses transition from hearing individual blasts of air separately to hearing them as a continuous sound. The work connects the polluted aerospaces of India and Europe but also the “inner winds” of lungs and respirators, integrating them all into a sound installation. Moving particles become sound, tone, and noise.
Air Circles focuses on rhythm. Several rotors, activated simultaneously, produce pulsating polyrhythms with frequencies in the range of infrasound, that is, below 20 hertz. Exploring spatial-sound and its physical effects, the number of air blasts per revolution is varied by motor speed and centrifugal force; phonetic material and variable “swoosh” sounds are used, one sample triggered per rotation. These acoustic movements, produced by the spinning objects, interpolate separate air blasts with continuous noise. Data from European and Indian measuring stations is visualised on displays and the changing air quality index values in cities such as Berlin, New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Singrauliare manifest as sound in the exhibition space. The immersive, constantly vibrating and altering image accelerates in tempo when air pollution is high. You can hear the planet running out of breath.