Future Noise Policy, 2018
Multi-channel audio installation

Sound is everywhere. It often remains, however, either beyond awareness, or is considered mere nuisance. In his site-specific installations, Andy G. Vidal creates interventions that seek to make disregarded noise specific to a place the object of renewed interest. He does so by playing with the viewer’s perception who wonders whether what (s)he hears is “normal” or “manipulated.” The result is an experience that makes real life feel like fiction, as oral and visual perceptions subtly fail to coincide.

Future Noise Policy is a multi-channel audio composition of architectural noises similar to those produced by the pipes, motors, ventilations, air conditioners and electrical installations potentially found inside the building. Through its title, the installation makes reference to the European Commission’s Green Paper on Future Noise Policy in which environmental noise is tackled as an official large-scale problem. These type of policies, as well as infrastructures such as sound walls in highways or isolation materials in architecture, reveal an ideology that aims to abolish noise, conceived as an uncomfortable drawback while also disregarding its own potential harm to the environment. In its turn, G. Vidal’s installation poetically reflects on this ideological dimension of architectural design, through acoustic means.

Special thanks: Project supported by the production program UAVA/C3A