Art book, Breathing Machinery, by Colin Priest, London, 2020

In July 2020, Priest took part in Lisa Hall’s online exhibition ‘Acts of Air: Reshaping the Urban Sonic’. The exhibition invited artists from around the world to conceive fourteen participatory sound art works for audiences to enact in their local urban environment. These visitors-turned-participants were also asked to document their experience on the exhibition’s Instagram channel.

Priest’s idea for Breathing Machinery, the title of both the participatory work he created for the exhibition and the book which resulted from it, sprung from his daily government authorised one-hour walks during the first lockdown in Britain. Walking in his neighbourhood in Hackney Wick, on the fringes of the London Olympic site usually thronging with construction activity, Priest became aware of the changed soundscape, and particularly of the ubiquitous ventilators. As many of us did, he first noticed birdsong ‘but then came the whirling air-conditioning units and air vents from the fish smokeries and breweries in the area. At the time there was a lot of discussion in the media about critical care air ventilators, instruments for human survival. And on my walk, a thought percolated about how inside and out, air and its movement, these breathing machines have become critical care instruments to our human and urban survival.’ The title of the work suggests the humanising of machinery and simultaneously our increasing dependence on it, something that was acutely highlighted during the early days of the pandemic when hospital ventilators were in short supply.

Priest describes the work he presented at the exhibition as ‘an invitation to find a mechanical air vent and to listen to it for 30 seconds, to take a portrait photograph of it and direct message or email the photo with an onomatopoeic caption for posting on the ‘Breathing Machinery’ Instagram feed over the exhibition period.’ During the two-month call out period, Priest received contributions from around the world, including from the United Kingdom, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden and the United States.

The book, designed by work-form and published in an edition of 30 copies, draws together 35 posts and, as such, captures a global conversation. It reflects our altered experience of urban environments during the pandemic, when familiar sounds of traffic and other human activity largely disappeared, while also illustrating how curators and artists found new ways of connecting with audiences when traditional exhibitions were disrupted.