HVAC, or Political Ecology as Facts of Pressure

Abstract

Do. Pretend to. Sit with me in a basement office and listen to the small universe we occupied for 7 years as a university worker. The office opens onto a hallway. A plaque on the door names the worker who is remunerated for her time in this office. She, or me, this working subject on university payroll, is joined by myriad bacterial and fungal beings that co-constitute her by virtue of inhabitation, thus the pronoun, “we.” They/we also work, feel, and react, doing their/our own thing and multiplying aural reception to the room, pushing beyond a singular. Together we hear the pressure of air as it moves through a metal duct. More distantly, behind a thin wall, a motor is working hard. It turns a circlet of blades that click-whirr, accelerating airflow through metal ducts. It sounds innocuous, even soothing, like noise generators that parents use to put their babies to sleep, or that therapists place outside the clinical door. The pipes are strapped into the space above a verti- cally suspended grid of compressed paper panels that occasionally jiggle. The blowing hovers just in the background of consciousness as we sit typing at the desk, a shadow in the corner, and certainly this was the intended design. Eventually, however, the sound of forced air emerges from the background fierce and fidgety, until the office becomes crowded with the clamor of numerous relations, many parts working together, well or badly. Metal ducts, corrosion, rust, seams, dust bunnies, dust, galvanized coating, strapping, fan blades, fungal colonies, gratings, barricading filters, motors, and coils shout out their existence, “listen to me!” “I am here too!” The air itself shunts in irregular rhythms as it collides with the duct’s concave interior surface. Operational flaws float in and out of recognition of our narrow human perceptual range. Terrible sounds emerge, inharmonious ones, such as the “diabolic” chord produced by an augmented fourth- a dissonant note in the middle of an otherwise harmonious chord, the stinkbug in the raspberry...