Couloir aérien (Air Corridor)
SOUND INSTALLATION — 2016
Air Corridor spotlights the air traffic that mostly goes unnoticed down here on the ground since airports are located far from city centers and airplanes fly high (at a cruising altitude of roughly 10 km). This installation is designed to detect civil aviation in the area around the exhibition site and blast it right into the exhibition itself, hijacking the overhead planes, as it were, out of the surrounding air space and into an art space. Air Corridor “monitors” aviation activity and amplifies the noise of airplanes lying in the vicinity of the art space while a video screen displays each detected flight number, altitude, speed, longitude and latitude for airliners cruising overhead. As soon as a flight is detected, its noise is diffused inside the exhibition site, bursting, booming, thundering sporadically into the ambient space, startling the exhibitiongoers when they least expect it. This untimely invasion of our sound space is intended to disrupt our carefree tranquility and remind us that airplanes are not merely a convenient and inoffensive means of transportation.
The installation at La Panacée is set in a corridor that is transformed, for the occasion, into a veritable air corridor.
The installation program uses radio detection of ADS-B signals (Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast) emitted by planes passing nearby.