Paul Rooney: Thin Air
Sound and Music, 2008
Softback, 32 pp., 210 × 148 mm
ISBN 978-1-907378-01-0

Belgian architectural historian Dr Annette Gomperts and her collaborator Paul Rooney have produced Thin Air: part academic lecture, part science-fiction story. Thin Air highlights the legacy of 1970s Leeds Polytechnic student Alan Smithson, who claimed that ‘voices’ he had recorded in the Polytechnic’s H Building were sonic manifestations of memories that had been somehow preserved in the electromagnetic ether of it’s rooms through a process which he called ‘site-anamnesis’. Smithson also asserted that the particularly radical and eventful – and ultimately tragic – history of the building had contributed to it’s facility for preserving and recalling the charged moments of remembrance.