Airports can be hell, as any traveler knows. From endless check-in lines to depersonalized security checkpoints to the dull monotony of waiting rooms and transit halls, the experience of traveling has become something of a 21st century ritual. You’ll (probably) get to your destination, but first you have to go through the (securitized and regulated) motions.

“By means of boredom, oddly familiar scenarios, and the climate-controlled atmospheres of in-transit buffers, the spaces and technologies of the airport relax our sensory spatial apprehension to camouflage the control parameters to which passengers are submitted,” write the Madrid-based design studio Bollería Industrial / Factory-Baked Goods in the text accompanying their installation Managing Distance, one of five commissioned “intervention strategies” of the In Residence component of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale.

Comprising five different physical devices placed around the sleek Oslo Airport in Gardermoen, their intervention playfully draws attention to a “highly-designed”, and often ignored, spatial experience that is heavily mediated by a series of technological apparatus. 

First, a public-address system reproduces the voices of passengers in real time, disrupting the homogenized audio that dominates transit spaces (and, in fact, often originates from same woman, Carolyn, whether in the New York subway of Paris Charles de Gaulle airport). The second device lets you share your liquids, rather than throw them away, by popping your half-drunk bottle into a bar-style dispenser. Third, the constant surveillance of airports and transit centers is transformed into a fun pastime with a video booth that invites you to sing in front of a screen. 

The fourth device hones in on explosive trace detection, which can often produce false positives if your skin care lotion contains glycerin. Equipped with a scanner and a hand sanitizer dispenser, the machine detects the amount of glycerin on your hand and uses the data to control an embedded screen, which displays anecdotes of real-life false positives and their ramifications. Finally, the fifth device reproduces welcoming messages recorded by other passengers so you don’t feel lonely if you’re grabbing a cab solo.

“The aim of these objects is to challenge the processes of conformity and homogenization to which passengers with different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds are submitted while at an airport,” the designers write. A long list of anecdotes—some humorous and others harrowing—accompanies the objects, facsimiles of which are displayed in the National Architecture Museum—Oslo. But even without this textual supplement, the objects speak clearly their intention, effectively drawing attention to the otherwise ignored and often dehumanizing experience of traveling.

In the process, the user can’t help but consider how this experience isn’t the same for everyone, how the installation isn’t necessarily as humorous for some as it is for others. After all, some travelers are subject to more scrutiny than others, while those with the means can largely bypass the more unpleasant stages of transit. And, perhaps most glaringly, entire populations don’t experience this taxing banality at all. 

Managing Dissidence is an installation in In Residence, an exhibit of the 2016 Oslo Triennale, After Belonging. For more on the Triennale, check out our interview with the curators here, and stay tuned for more reports from Oslo.