journal of visual culture

Sharing Architecture: Space, Time and the Aesthetics

of Pressure

Brandon LaBelle

Abstract
Exploring acoustic space, this article aims to supplement the practice of
acoustic design by exposing other perspectives on sound’s relationship
to space. Following Paul Carter’s notion of sonic ambiguity, the author
contends that the idealized sonic image of acoustics eliminates the
potentiality inherent to sound and listening as forces of relational intensity
and differentiation. To draw out this tension, the article examines
alternative forms of acoustics as appearing within the practice of sound
art. Through eccentric and speculative design, sound art comes to
demonstrate a vital addition to notions of acoustics; by creating heightened
listening experiences that exceed the traditional concepts of fidelity, it
cultivates forms of noise by integrating extreme volume and frequency,
building fantastical architectures for their diffusion, and incorporating
a dynamic understanding of psychoacoustics and perception. Through
such elements, sound and space are brought together and deliver other
forms of acoustical experience while hinting at potentialities for their
application in environments outside the art situation. Works by such
artists as Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec and John Wynne provide a vibrant
terrain for registering how sound comes to perform as spatial material.

Keywords
cultural acoustics • environment • sound art • space

If a work of architecture speaks only of contemporary trends and

sophisticated visions without triggering vibrations in its place, this work
is not anchored in its site, and I miss the specific gravity of the ground it
stands on. (Zumthor, 1998: 37)
journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Copyright © The Author(s), 2011. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav
Vol 10(2): 177–188 DOI 10.1177/1470412911402889

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178 journal of visual culture  10(2)

Questions of the immaterial and the evanescent within architecture open up

understandings of space to the dynamics of sensorial experience. As Peter
Zumthor suggests, experiences of architecture are often charged by the flows
of energy and atmospheric texture, contributing meaningful force to the hard
edges of space. Feelings for a place thus impart great influence onto our sense
of being located.
Jean-Paul Thibaud (2011) elaborates on this sensorial dimension of space,
suggesting that the ‘ambience’ of place functions as an energetic flux bringing
forward the temporal and situational details of spatiality.

To put it in a few words, an ambience can be defined as a time–space

qualified from a sensory point of view. It relates to the sensing and
feeling of a place. Each ambience involves a specific mood expressed in
the material presence of things and embodied in the way of being of city
dwellers. Thus, ambience is both subjective and objective: it involves the
lived experience of people as well as the built environment of the place.

In this regard, elements of light, sound, smell and texture, along with weather,
social energy and the fluctuations of mood significantly add dynamic presence
to the concrete structures of space and, for Thibaud, the experiences of urban
life. By paying more attention to these seemingly immaterial elements, the built
environment may be underscored as ‘relational’ and ‘event-oriented’, thereby
infusing material form with multiple energies and constitutions.
It is my perspective that such elaboration of the built environment gives way
to a pluralization of spatial constructs: no longer do sightlines and visual
perspective solely define that formation of the built, nor do the graphical
languages of architectural planning reign over approaches toward building. In
contrast, fluctuations in temperature, lighting, weathering and the dynamics of
ambient temporality contribute to the shaping of spatial constructs and to the
spatial imagination.
Luis Fernández-Galiano (2000) provides an extremely rich examination of
architecture through the lens of ‘energy’. Aspects of energy, from thermodynamic
expenditure to the material transubstantiation occurring in construction itself,
impart a suggestive link between architectural forms and animate life. Based
on Fernández-Galiano’s analysis, questions of the ambient, or what is generally
located undercover, alongside, in the background or within the passing of time
take on vital presence within architecture. This is furthered in the work of
architect Kisho Kurokawa (1994) and his theories of Metabolist architecture. For
Kurokawa, the separations of inside and outside often promoted by architecture
create too sharp a distinction and undermine the greater ‘metabolism’ at the core
of spatial design. In contrast, his work seeks to insert what he calls ‘intermediary’
spaces ‘unobstructed by any dualistic division between inside and outside, a
space free from the divisions of walls’ (p. 156). The energetic and metabolistic
models of architecture come to recognize the built space as a gathering of forces
into momentary stability; even our own bodies, in their exertions, heat fields
and performances must be accounted for within any description of the flows

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 LaBelle  Sharing Architecture 179

of energy that surround and define the built environment. A field of pressures
can be appreciated as bending, sculpting and impressing upon built form, in the
flows and waves of time itself.
Interestingly, sound and auditory presence lend dramatic energy to the unfolding
of space. As the oscillation of air particles, sound is the diffusion and refraction
of energy moving through the medium of air and, further, as structure-borne
energy in the form of vibrations passing through walls and floors. Sound provides
an intensely temporal conditioning to the built environment, giving vibrant
input to experiences of place. Its energetic, intrusive and animate presence also
contours space with degrees of psychological and emotional coloring, unfurling
a psychodynamics of place.
We might further glimpse the degrees to which sound lends an expanded ambient
feature to architecture by recognizing the ways in which acoustical engineering
operates. From a professional point of view, acoustic design addresses the
movements of sound through a given space and often focuses on minimizing
extreme echo, or vibration, producing modifications to existing spaces. The
temporality of sound, its ability to leak out and spill across room borders and the
energetic exchanges it conducts onto matter challenge the architectural tendency
towards graphical lay-outs. Acoustics provide a suggestive frame for appreciating
how ambient elements and the temporality of occupying space may feature as
material ingredients for spatial constructs. To build a room that considers the
movements of sound, which by nature can override separations defined by walls,
results in a contouring of space according to the invisible pressures that sound
comes to exert. Yet the flows and ruptures defined by sound, as an unsteadily
balanced energy, can be heard to lend an element of positive unfixity to the built
environment. Architectural acoustics often runs behind sound through spatial
modifications that respond to existing interferences.
Paul Carter (2004), in his insightful article ‘Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and
Auditory Space’, gives a compelling examination of sound and acts of listening
based on the theme of ‘ambiguity’. Claiming that listening as a communicational
channel incorporates the pleasures and potential of ambiguity, the author stakes
out a productive territory in which ‘mishearing’ opens out into a rich process
of interaction. For Carter, the ambiguity found in sound grants a flexibility and
surprise to semantic meaning, fostering the soft connotations that arise within
speaking. Although Carter’s work focuses primarily on sound, I think it also
starts to raise questions about the temporal and ephemeral in general. His
notion of a ‘productive ambiguity’ may contribute to a deeper and more fluid
understanding of architecture. For if we begin to appreciate the ambient flux
around us as animating and imparting degrees of effective play onto surrounding
environments, it may be on the level of making ambiguous the strictly functional
and spatial program of architecture. That is, these ambient, elemental pressures
may give pleasure to the strict logic of the built environment by imparting
degrees of radical flexibility and slippage.
In following the immaterial, the ambient and the evanescent, a new understanding
of architecture arises, one that in turn finds articulation in a variety of theoretical

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180 journal of visual culture  10(2)

and discursive projects. The history of architecture carries with it a lineage of

supplemental literatures that aim to bring a reminder of the sensual qualities
that come with being in a space. As Fernández-Galiano (2000) also shows, the
history of architecture, from its primal and mythical beginning exemplified in
the primitive fire around which space initially took shape, the image of static
built form contains its own supplemental dimension of shadow and light, energy
fields and animate life. Such extra-architectural elements may lead to a ‘poetics
of space’ that is equally fundamental materiality. As Junichiro Tanizaki (2001)
eloquently notes, the shadowy impingement onto spatial interiors function as
formal expression. In this way, we might begin to take seriously the sphere
of interior design as a sort of subtext to architecture proper, which radically
constructs space with an interweaving of fabrics, or with subtle applications of
moodsong.
Importantly, this supplemental image or understanding takes on greater
influence with the emergence and infiltration of ‘networked cultures’. While
the immediate presence of weathering, ambient sensuality, energy expenditure
and atmospheric design contributes to an ephemeral enveloping of space,
connective networking and related digital devices extend the immediate
with further ambient and temporal elements. The immersive flows of mobile
communicational devices sensitize the lines and curves of spatial design, filling
spatial volume with the heat of electromagnetic energies that are no less
physical and embodied. In this sense, the built environment and the particular
understanding of temporal features are reworked and brought into a greater
narrative based on digital envelopment, demarcation and sharing. From such
a condition, the operations of design start to consider the connective, looking
towards not only physical context, or community life, but also the feverish
pressures by which individual experiences are currently shaped. The built is
understood then more as a malleable and elemental force, impressed and
pressing back, and constituted by this dynamic exchange. A construct held in
the balance.
An important and interesting example can be found in the recent concert hall
in Copenhagen designed by Jean Nouvel. Opened in 2009, the concert hall
(containing the studios of Danish Radio) features a blue sheath wrapping the
cubic building. This translucent covering reveals the shadowy interior life of the
building as it takes place behind the main glass exterior, while also serving as
a projection surface, which at night features live images from concerts as well
as recorded montages of concert scenes with colorful extracts. In this way, the
building expresses a sort of virtual porosity, physically confusing interior and
exterior, real and mediated, and blending the movements of occupants with
that of recorded imagery. The building in a sense starts to relate to the reality of
mediated public space, taking into consideration the materiality of networked
culture as one built with live streaming, internet interactions, mobile devices
and social utility websites.
The animate exterior of the Copenhagen building might be appreciated as
an energy field, as well as a socially connective membrane, bringing the life

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 LaBelle  Sharing Architecture 181

of the building into an active relationship with its external environment. This
‘interactivity’ is not so much a one-to-one relation, of input and output, but a
literal projection of an architecture designed according to the logic of networked
culture, an architecture ready to move beyond itself.

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec – Undoing Architecture

The interest in addressing the movements of ambient elements might be said

to articulate a supplementary culture of architectural production. Entwined
within the fact of building, the question and engagement with temporality and
evanescence can be further witnessed in various artistic projects, often working
with digital systems or networks sited within particular locations. These projects
result in a performative staging of existing ambiences, amplifying, providing
feedback and displacing experiences of the built environment.
The artist Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, originally from Slovenia and now resident in
Holland, has developed numerous projects operating in this way. In following the
work of Sambolec, questions of architecture and the senses find unique elaboration.
Through performative interventions within a given architecture, Sambolec’s
Virtual Mirror and Virtual Hole projects attempt to bring forward this heightened
sense of the temporal and the transitory, the immaterial flux of pressures and
energies that constitute space. His strategy of bringing the outside in, of unfolding
and fraying the edges of architectural space, provides a rich and fruitful point of
contact, which opens the senses up to that which is always already present as
an influencing and effective factor. Whether through acts of ‘mirroring’ external
phenomena, or by cutting an imaginary ‘hole’ into a building that allows outside
elements directly inside, Sambolec’s project elaborates what one might call an
‘aesthetics of pressure’: creating links between the exterior forces that surround
an interior space, his work performs a rupture, breaking the demarcating lines
between inside and out through an imaginary or virtual alignment.
For instance, in his recent project, Virtual Mirror – Rain (2009), the artist has
created an intervention at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana by focusing on
the relation of the building to the exterior force of rain. Through the construction
of a digital sensing system, the project essentially responds to the presence of
rain: each drop of rain, as it falls onto a specially constructed horizontal plate
located off-site at a nearby gallery, comes to trigger a ‘mirror image’ in which a
small spray of water rises from the floor of the museum. This extremely subtle
and yet no less dramatic orchestration comes to create an imaginary play. As
viewers, we are asked to follow the corresponding relation between an exterior
input and an interior result, between a remote cause and its resulting effect.
By forming a link between the rain outside, and the interior event, Sambolec
dramatizes the possibility of the outside coming in. The transitory instant of rain
finds a way into the building, returning in the form of a sculptural effect to lead
the imagination through a spatial poetics, where inside and outside begin to
converse (see Figures 1 and 2).

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182 journal of visual culture  10(2)

Figure 1  Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Virtual Mirror – Rain (2009): custom

made hardware/software, water. Photo Dejan Habicht.

Figure 2  Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Virtual Mirror – Rain (2009): conceptual

sketch.

Sambolec’s project creates a network that comes to reform the built; in his work,
architecture is more than the capturing of spatial volume or the modulation of
structure, but an event in time. The architect Bernard Tschumi (1996) explores what
he calls the ‘event of architecture’ through the theme of violence, proposing that:

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 LaBelle  Sharing Architecture 183

Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or
erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant
intercourse with users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established
rules of architectural thought. (p. 123)

The movement of the body intrudes on the spatial features of architecture,

expressing an element of duration and inhabitation in relation to design. In
Sambolec’s case, the intrusion of the body, as an element of constant intervention,
shifts to more subtle and non-human elements. Virtual Mirror – Rain recognizes
that what disrupts architecture is not only the ways in which we use space, as
bodies, but importantly, how forms of natural or elemental force and energy
continually envelop the built environment, to touch, to give texture, to effect
and influence the conditions of spatiality. As Juhani Pallasmaa (2007) further
proposes, the ambient and sensorial elements at play around us give architecture
a feeling for lived time. Virtual Mirror – Rain starts to stage this lived time by
placing it at the centre of the museum, shifting focus from bodies in space to
greater environmental forces. In doing so, Sambolec provides a rich examination
of spatiality, ultimately suggesting that such ambient and temporal energy forces
are in fact not supplemental to architecture, but exist as core materials by which
space is made apparent.
The pressures of the outside are then features that, while requiring resistance or
partial control, impart a dramatic feeling for the passing of time. From seasonal
changes to the passing of a day, the ongoing transitory conditions that flow
around us are elements that may appear in contrast to the stability and seemingly
immutable nature of buildings. Buildings might be partially understood as the
things that mostly withstand time, that resist the pressures of the everyday and
lend continuity to our daily rituals. In contrast, the shifts in light throughout the
course of a year, the flux of weather conditions and the sonorous undulations
that flow over and around different environments, for example, all come to
animate the built, rendering a poetics of the moment in shadow and light, silence
and noise, rain and sun. The fleeting and transitory become active elements by
which we might locate not only where we are in space, but importantly, also
in time. As Sambolec’s artistic project poignantly suggests, is the roof above our
heads really as solid as we might imagine?

John Wynne – Improper Acoustics

The integration of ambient elements within an artistic project has featured

within a particular legacy of sound installation. Sound installation can be
understood as a fundamental example of an expanded compositional strategy,
often lacing together multiple inputs to form an interweaving of natural and
synthetic sound. Might the experience of listening already open the way for
such strategies, supporting more inclusive and environmental projects? The
history of sound installation seems to give a preliminary answer to the relational
questions continually posed within the visual arts. While much work occurring
traditionally within visual arts practices posed often critical views on questions

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184 journal of visual culture  10(2)

of representation, identity formation and the structures of ideology, sound

installation, in operating as a form of rupture onto the scene of the stable
referent, seeks to unfurl an event for the senses. It creates a time and a space
already designed outside the tensions of the ocular, bypassing the challenges
posed by linguistic meaning and skirting the ideological question of identity for
a total restructuring of signification – listening as a platform for the making of
alternative relationships. Live, temporal, evanescent, ambient, emotional and
tactile, the movements and behaviours of sound impart an altogether different
condition that includes more than meets the eye. In this regard, sound installation
as an art form readily embraces a greater field of matter, aligning object, subject
and environment within an expanded production.
Alongside the work of Tao Sambolec, the works of artist John Wynne in turn
express this drive towards ambient environments and networked constructs. His
recent installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner (2009) creates
an expansive sonic composition that connects an array of different elements.
Based primarily on the installation of a player piano (Pianola) within the gallery
space at Beaconsfield in London, the installation attempts to elaborate upon
the existing acoustical character of the gallery and its relation to the external
environment. Produced as part of a summer residency, the artist undertook a
series of spatial and acoustical investigations, mapping the particular resonance
and sonic coloration of the room alongside a concern for the interconnection
between inside and outside – particularly, noises from the nearby railroad tracks,
which, for Wynne, became an added sonority for his installation.
In addition to the Pianola, the work consists of 300 discarded loudspeakers
retrieved from recycling depots in London and Berlin, a 32-channel sonic
playback of composed sounds and a vacuum cleaner (powering the Pianola),
all of which come to form a sculptural and sonic effect that extends from one
perceptual coordinate to another. As a result of the artist’s investigations of the
gallery space, a series of synthetic sounds were composed and they play from
the array of loudspeakers. These are complemented by a modified piano roll of
Gipsy Love, a Franz Lehár operetta (1909), which plays automatically from the
Pianola but at a reduced speed and sounding only notes that correspond to the
natural acoustics of the gallery. Such a gathering of sonic elements seems to
seek out points not only of conjunction, but also dislocation and displacement:
the work creates a soft balance between order and chaos, organization and its
beakdown (see Figures 3 and 4).
Integrating composed sounds with the sounds of the Pianola, and in
correspondence with the acoustical play of the space and the exterior
environment, the installation is a sort of live organic composition of varying
input and output. In this way, the work begins to form a productive unsteadiness
between these differing forces, each of which threatens to take over and yet
remains folded within this extended perceptual field. Such a constellation of
elements increasingly demands a shift in the focal point of attention: the delicate
unfurling of sounds as they arise from different points in the room find both
support and rupture from the trains passing by outside; and the bulky mass of
loudspeakers, with their plastic and wood surfaces, command attention while

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 LaBelle  Sharing Architecture 185

Figure 3  John Wynne (2009), Installation for 300 Speakers, Pianola

and Vacuum Cleaner. © Photograph John Wynne.

Figure 4  John Wynne (2009), Installation for 300 Speakers, Pianola and
Vacuum Cleaner. © Photograph Steve Ibb.

attempting to integrate with the Pianola’s broken acoustical melodies. Such

unsteadiness I take as a point of departure for outlining, as in Sambolec’s work,
this aesthetics of pressure. How does this interplay of inside and outside, hard-
edged materiality and the softness of effect, locate us as sensing subjects? What

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186 journal of visual culture  10(2)

forms of geographic or topographic relations unfold from within this field

of amplifications and compositions, as an augmented weave of natural and
synthetic, immediate and connective?
Animate, energetic and pressurized, as atmospheric particles and networked
connectivity, such work starts to sonically unfold an ‘improper acoustics’
designed explicitly for overwhelming space – to exceed the material and
ocular limits of spatiality in support of an enlarged definition. Sound comes to
operate as a radical spatial proposition by crossing over between inside and
outside environments, between the outside of the skin and the inside of the ear,
creating a sense of immediacy and also intrusion. This improper acoustics, under
discussion here, also points to the interconnectivity between human and non-
human, and between elemental force and social communication across which
sound operates. Wynne’s project subtly underscores how sound and listening
may over-ride these distinctions, erasing the lines between what we imagine as
public and private. The promise of sound might be that it exposes us not only to
each other, but also to the passing of unseen forces around us.

Sharing Architecture

In following this mode of working and the intertwining of ambient elements,

we might begin to locate a critical language appropriate to the realm of
atmospheres, weather, listening and live-sensing. This would demand a shift from
the ‘performative’ and the ‘embodied’, which centres its understanding around
notions of the human subject, to that of energy surges and atmospheric pressures
in which the body is but a single element. Such work opens up an experiential
form of reception that also exceeds human perception, searching for a greater
field of attention. In particular, as in both Sambolec’s and Wynne’s projects,
the ambient is more than background, but a beginning for the construction of
connective spatialities.
Jack Burnham’s highly illuminating article, ‘Systems Esthetics’ (1968), aimed to
elaborate upon the emergence of the ‘information age’. Responding to currents
in artistic practice and the increased involvement with electronics, computer
networks and engineering exemplified in the work of E.A.T. (Experiments in
Art and Technology), Burnham supplies a dramatic analysis, claiming the new
‘unobjects’ of this contemporary art were fully aligned with a general paradigm
shift of society at large. As he states: ‘We are now in transition from an object-
oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things,
but from the way things are done’ (emphases in original).
Following Burnham, such systems orientation might be seen as prescient of
today’s culture. Yet in considering our contemporary global culture, we might
also appreciate the evolution of ‘systems’ into ‘networks’, which might also shift
understanding from the ‘way things are done’ to ‘the way we share’. In considering
these artistic projects, which take their cue from existing environmental features
and that seek to thread the ambient through a structuring and compositional
processing as an elaboration of the sensual, my attention is turned less to the

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 LaBelle  Sharing Architecture 187

systems installed and more to how they point towards where we are. Change,
as Burnham suggests, unfolds partly through the way things are done, but also
according to their distribution and networked spatiality.
The structuring and processing of the ambient forms a sort of elemental
distribution by incorporating, amplifying and caring for what is surrounding.
The everyday, from this perspective, is perceived as an existing network of
multiple players and conditions contained within a greater environmental flux.
Atmospheric pressures, the force of sound waves, humidity, wind and the
sensual tease of the experiential form a constellation of elements forced into
aesthetic alignment. Such aesthetics point towards a condition that exceeds
notions of participation or relationality.
These flows of pressure thus define a contingent space, one that in turn implicates
or involves mediation and networks. With the steady emergence of digital
infrastructures, the mounting of elaborate surveillance systems and the mobile
devices that find firm footing within the everyday, the understanding of ambient
and evanescent conditions takes precedence. As Kazys Varnelis (2008) explains,
‘networked culture’ must be understood as the prevailing ‘cultural logic’ of
our contemporary situation. This logic introduces greater inter-relationality
between what conventionally is called ‘the actual’ and ‘the virtual’ to generate
new configurations of the material and the immaterial. In following the works
of Tao Sambolec and John Wynne, we might glimpse this logic in action, as a
culture of artistic work that seeks to occupy and mobilize the existing sense
of multiplied perspectives. I use the term ‘aesthetics of pressure’ to signal that
such contingency, such artistic projects and such interweaving of material and
immaterial emerge as a platform of potentiality that includes friction, tension
and a general suspension of fixed understanding. Wynne’s installation acts as a
structure by which to hold together a set of elements, but which does so in a
sense according to a pressurized dynamics. The inclusion of low-tech and high-
tech tools, of concern for the real and its mediated playback, from sculpture
to sonic experience, calls forth a hybrid aesthetics aimed at distribution and
temporal connection. His improper acoustics is a sort of noise that puts disparate
elements into conversation. Sambolec, in turn, stages an architectural rupture
that points to what in a sense is always already there, as participant within space,
that of temporality and the changing patterns of weather.
By way of conclusion, Sanford Kwinter’s (2002) enlightening examination of
‘architectures of time’ provides a useful perspective in appreciating the flows
of energy and the temporality of ambient movements as dramatically participant
within architecture. For Kwinter, ‘there is not “time” per se that is distinct
from extension, only a perpetual, simultaneous unfolding, a differentiation, an
individuation en bloc of points – moments that are strictly inseparable from
their associated milieus or their conditions of emergence.’ In this sense, ‘the
temporal factor here is not “time” itself … but rather a general conception
of nature as a “flow phenomenon,” a dynamical, richly implicated system of
eventual becomings’ (p. 48, emphases in the original). The dynamically rich
unfurling of ‘flow phenomenon’ begins to interlock ‘event’ and ‘spatiality’ so
as to make them inseparable, ultimately placing the built in a state of perennial

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188 journal of visual culture  10(2)

reconfiguration. The time of this architecture can also be appreciated as the time
of sharing. In this regard, the ambient, intermediary and energetic forces bring
us closer to participating in the spatial moment.

References
Burnham, J. (1968) ‘Systems Esthetics’, Artforum, September. URL (consulted 2010):
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/jevbratt/readings/burnham_se.html
Carter, P. (2004) ‘Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space’, in V. Erlmann
(ed.) Hearing Cultures, pp. 43–64. Oxford: Berg.
Fernández-Galiano, L. (2000) Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kurokawa, K. (1994) The Philosophy of Symbiosis. London: Academy Editions.
Kwinter, S. (2002) Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of Event in Modernist
Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pallasmaa, J. (2007) The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester:
Wiley.
Tanizaki, J. (2001) In Praise of Shadows. Sedgwick, ME: Leete’s Island Books.
Thibaud, J.-P. (2011) ‘The Three Dynamics of Urban Ambiances’, in B. LaBelle and
C. Martinho (eds) Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear, Vol. II. Berlin: Errant
Bodies Press.
Tschumi, B. (1996) Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Varnelis, K. (2008) ‘Network Culture’, varnetlis.net. URL (consulted 2010): http://
varnelis.net/network_culture
Zumthor, P. (1998) Thinking Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer whose work explores the space between
sound and sociality, using performance and on-site constructions as creative
supplements to existing conditions. He co-edited the anthologies Site of Sound: Of
Architecture and the Ear (Errant Bodies Press, 1999); Writing Aloud: The Sonics
of Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2001); Surface Tension: Problematics of Site
(Errant Bodies Press, 2003); and Radio Territories (Errant Bodies Press, 2006), and
is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum, 2006)
and Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum, 2010).

Address: Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Strømg 1, 5015 Bergen, Norway.
[email: brandon.labelle@khib.no]

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