Audio Attunements for Desert Living

Scholars and practitioners of various backgrounds have banded together to imagine how habits, myths, and ritualistic practices of the desert Southwest might be reimagined for the urban desert’s uncertain future. The project uses sensory experience to reconfigure our relationship to cultural practices and to build a new bodily architecture for dwelling. Audio Attunements is an immersive audio experience of the desert buttressed by humanities and arts research. The installation proposed for Hayden Library highlights the porousness of nature-culture in Phoenix. The desert salon provides learning through sense immersion and explores the library as a distributed network of analog tools for accessing the desert. It activates the library as a membrane between the desert space beyond its walls and its enclosed cultural interior.