The term Volume can architecturally describe “the amount of space a substance or object occupies or is enclosed within a container” – in this case a room/cell which itself contains a given quantity of air subject to that enclosures’ specific pressure, temperature and humidity. Volume equally describes “the quantity or power of sound”.

Suitable is a laden term, socially constructed along ethical lines reflecting a society’s mores. The cell itself was originally conceived as a confining, uncrossable, non-negotiable and socially exclusive space – the ultimate threshold of socially constituted freedom, one bounded by barred window and door as thresholds.
A suitable volume brings the air within a cell at The Old Lockup into movement by utilizing the resonance and (social, physical and ontological) thresholds of the door and window with the air’s specific qualities (humidity, temperature, pressure) of that architectural volume with respect to adjacent volumes via these thresholds.

Four speakers within the cell create oscillations, similar to that employed in SPECTRES and also the Climata project in 15 James Turrell Skyspaces. These bring the air within an architectural volume into a dynamic and tactile relation with the outside, an immersive exchange through an aperture (threshold), causing the architectural volume to act as frame and filter for the location and context – a threshold effect.

Oscillating beating-frequencies using sine tones tuned to a range of the given volume’s specific architectural resonances create a gesamtkunstwerk comprising sound - and the specific body of air - from the complex combination of each of these simple oscillations drawing outside air in via multiple motions. The acoustic energy required to bring the threshold’s adjacent airs into audible motion are also described in terms of “volume” – the sound level heard within the cell’s enclosed space in which the installation will occur.

Speakers within the cell activate the threshold effect around the door, window and beneath the bench in The Old Lockup's Cell 1 and by adjacence the gaol's vestibule area. The piece has been developed in-situ utilizing multiple recordings bearing three hallmarks: beating frequencies where two sine waves act upon the cell’s resonances; sound from outside/adjacent volumes being drawn inside; and the key spatial 'artifact' of the process - a “whooshing”/fluttering sound, an effect of the air which, combined with the other two elements in the recording, creates the psychoacoustic effect of the sound “appearing” to come from ‘everywhere’. An acoustic curtain created across the cell and gaol's doorways and windows causes air in these thresholds to be audibly heard/perceived, creating a palpable yet invisible separation between self and external world, reminiscent of the cell’s origin, altered by abstraction. Tuned beating frequencies and Helmholtz resonances cause the threshold’s discretionary air-mass to oscillate - the threshold becomes a springy mass moving against outside air, compressing and returning into the internal air and threshold, and oscillating over again and again.

Drawing on the “light and space” movement's (cf Robert Irwin, Dan Graham, Helen Pashgian) intentions, but shifting that modus operandi to “sound and location”, the installation explores perceptual conditioning by also deploying site-specific, architectural interventions modulating physical, sensory and temporal experiences of the cell's volume and location. Attendees are engaged through the creation of an immersive and palpable architectural transmogrification via the cell’s air’s qualities, while appearing as a transparent and otherwise invisible intervention, save for largely hidden speakers. While Graham focuses on Focault’s heterotopia (addressing spaces where norms of behaviour are suspended and highlight the body in crisis or in deviation) A Suitable Volume's use of thresholds addresses a Deleuzian reterritorialisation through ontological shifts in our physical awareness of sound, spatial perception and how our presence changes things. The cell frames the body in a captive suspension - while we’re free to go, the volume’s air is caught in oscillations across the cell’s thresholds. These shifts from the world of appearances to the world-as-heard yields shifts in cognition conditioning and our mode of being, a “freeing”, contrary to the cell’s Focauldian “discipline and punish” origin.