Dressing The Air is the brainchild of the London-based artist Paul Schütze.

In a career spanning 30 years, Schütze has exhibited his photographic and installation works in galleries and museums around the world, released over thirty albums of original recordings, scored a number of films and performed numerous concerts. He has collaborated with artists such as James Turrell, Josiah McElheny and Isaac Julien and musicians as diverse as Bill Laswell, Raoul Björkenheim, Toshinori Kondo, Lol Coxhill and Jah Wobble.

Dressing The Air is a unique open resource that aims to enrich creative thinking by encouraging a multi-sensory approach. A constantly evolving archive and creative news feed, Dressing The Air monitors and reports on a diverse range of art-forms from cinema to sculpture, painting to furniture design, land-art to perfumery.

dressing the air: the bureau of sensory intelligence

a creative resource to provoke and inspire

Nightingale and Canary - audio life forms - Andy Thomas
Andy Thomas

18/09/14

Nightingale and Canary - audio life forms - Andy Thomas

Dressing The Air often visits projects which offer visualizations (or perhaps cross-sensory simulations is more apt) of information from aural, numerical, tactile sources. Andy Thomas has produced a number of very specific videos in which immaculate recordings of bird song are represented by highly detailed spacial abstractions. The most interesting thing about them is the direct mirroring of every sonic nuance by a visible movement in the forms he builds. Our sonic environment is so extraordinarily complex and dense, it can become easy to blank the vast bulk of what we hear. These animations vividly represent the sheer density of aural information we routinely "deflect". Rather puzzling however is the generally botanical nature of the structures the artist creates, triggered by the sounds. 

Vimeo
"If we imagine the forms of a formal garden like the Boboli or the Villa Medici in masonry instead of vegetation we get an unexpectedly bizarre construction which shows that people let themselves be confined by plants in ways they would endure uneasily indoors."
- Robert Harbison, 1977, Eccentric Spaces