Category: Research

   The Avenue of Sound is a research through art and design project designed and performed by guest artist and researcher Steen Lund Holbek. The installation consists of two parallel sound walls — each 7 meters long and 2 meters high — built from 32 mismatched loudspeakers powered by 16 equally idiosyncratic hi-fi amplifiers. Positioned four meters apart, the speaker walls form a corridor through which visitors are invited to walk, linger, and listen. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the installation unfolds as an exploratory field of microvariations and distributed intensities. Visitors shape their own embodied listening experience by moving…

 Embodied Musical Mediation Apparatus EMMA is an interactive sonic interface for embodied and social interaction. Developed as a hexagonal sound sculpture, the project invites multiple participants to engage with sound through bodily movement, spatial proximity, and shared attention. Each side of the sculpture is equipped with a distance sensor that responds to the presence and motion of a participant, shaping musical behavior in real time through an embedded synthesis system. While EMMA can be engaged by a single participant, it is fundamentally designed for multi-participant interaction: as more people enter the system, more voices, zones, and pattern combinations become available, allowing the music to…

Breathe Kritisk is a fictional rehabilitation machine. It does not cure any physical symptoms, but it may cure deep-rooted beliefs that we have about the control between medical devices and one’s body. The machine stands as a two-meter-tall chamber with two air pillows inside. The visitor can inflate and deflate the air pillows through the breathing sensor, which sometimes complies with and other times manipulates the visitor’s breath. This work aims to provoke visitors to reflect upon control which patients grapple with and lose in medical settings and to technological devices. The design stems from medical humanities, which focuses on subjective and invisible experiences in…

UDREDNING ("Diagnosing") is an MR (mixed reality) audiovisual installation based on diaries, social media entries, and interviews with parents who have kids who are either in a diagnosing process or who recently have been through one. In the project, we try to express what it means to be a parent to a child going through the process of a rare disease diagnosis. There are around 800 known rare disease diagnoses, and for a disease to be rare only 1-2 persons for every 10.000 persons can be diagnosed with it. When you are the parent of a child being diagnosed due to developmental delays, medical events,…

LYDSPOR (SONIC TRACES), is a site-specific sonic experience that allows people to feel and sense narrative fragments of the past, interwoven with the present-day experience of human and nonhuman bodies co-existing in the city of Elsinore. The LYDSPOR experience uses sonic technologies and soundscapes to augment the existing space of the city with forgotten sounds and stories from the 1500-1600s, and it consists of three parts. Two physical installations; one at the harbour and the other at the City Museum of Elsinore, and one app-based soundwalk on the street Hestemøllestræde, leading up from the harbour to where the museum is located. The installation at the…

This project is an art project and exhibition by art duo Foo/Skou (link). For this project AIR LAB has been developing an interactive framework and the sonic interaction design for the exhibition, on close collaboration with the two artists. The result of the collaboration was exhibited at Nikolaj Kunsthall in Copenhagen (29th of May - 22nd of August, 2021). Disharmony of Spheres was created with inspiration from the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler’s idea of ‘the music of the universe’, a universe in ‘perfect harmony’. In a time of climate crisis, increasing polarisation and global pandemic, the audio-visual and interactive installation challenges the concept of…

PLURIVERS is a sound installation mounted in a birch tree trunk, that was found at the park surrounding the ArtCenter Silkeborg Bad. The installation transmit sound through the trunk, by use of surface transducers. When a participant is leaning an ear on the trunk to listen, a soundscape is heard and a circuit between the tree, the person and the forrest is completed. The audio recordings used are recorded by anthropologist Stine Krøijer and her project team during a research field trip to the amazonas, and mixed into a soundscape by AIR LAB.   The installation was made…

What if spouses and professional caregivers could experience the emotional distress, confusion, and cognitive challenges facing people with dementia ? The DemSim project is about the design and construction of a desktop-sized multi-sensorial space allowing us to experiment with ways to expose people without dementia to a state of cognitive overload. While still in its infancy the project aims to break all the established standards considered crucial for successful interface and interaction design. By means of tactile, visual, proprioceptive, auditory and vestibular stimulation we will systematically seek to push the user towards a state of cognitive overload, amnesia, lack of concentration and Apraxia. In effect…