« ABA's Air SALON » air salon: tunnel through the air

tunnel through the air is an experimental audio work for broadcast by visual artists Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter. The score for the piece commissions micro-task workers to record one minute of room tone—wherever they are, whatever they are doing. Clips are sourced through a tasking platform such as MicroWorkers. Each clip is treated as a documented one-minute performance. The recordings are edited as a montage, compressing together the various tonal qualities of the recording devices each workers has at hand, the digital files and infrastructures that transmit these recordings, and the ambient sounds of each listener’s own environment as it mixes with the radio waves. Recording, transmission, and reception intermingle across time and space over the course of the hour, circling from room to room, from inside to outside, from day to night, from voice to noise, from individual to collective, and back again.

The first iteration of the work was produced by Benedict (in conversation with Rueter) in 2017. Each subsequent iteration of the work continues to add to accumulation of one-minute recordings. The earliest files remain anonymous, with no information recorded from the hits. However, geography and political context feel increasingly vital to the layered dimensions of the work, so over the years we began to document more accurately a selection of the metadata provided by the micro-tasking platform, compiled below in the program notes.

ABA Air SALON is a radio format produced by Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Berlin based artist initiative dealing with the distribution and documentation of forms of collective and experimental knowledge production. The broadcasts come from different locations in Berlin where we organize salons. At these salons we meet with local actors, artists, scientists and other cultural producers to exchange around research based artistic projects and practices. You can find more information about our program at www.airberlinalexanderplatz.de

ABA (Air Berlin Alexanderplatz) e.V., is a research-oriented artists' initiative founded in Berlin in 2009 by the artists Susanne Kriemann & Aleksander Komarov. The programme focuses on ephemeral artistic research and collective and experimental knowledge production. ABA’s operations consist of the conception, curation and implementation of various presentational formats: The organization of salons in different locations across the city, the release of publications, the stewardship of a residency-program and the maintenance of a website as a central place for documentation and archiving of these forms of ephemeral knowledge production.