The Wonderful Airport: Negotiating the Limits of the Modern International Airport’s Political Aesthetic

The air terminal has long been considered neither capable of awakening the senses nor eliciting wonder as an aesthetic shock to thought. The pathos of wonder as thaumazein thus appears far removed from the air passenger’s task mode-driven, functional perception. However, modern international airports appropriate wonder and exploit its psychotropic potential by incorporating and integrating visual media art, which alters their spatial and symbolic experience. I will zero in on Changi Airport in Singapore and the Jewel—a nature-inspired, entertainment and retail complex, integrated into the airspace, with a view to exploring select art installations and their role in the airport’s visual transmutation into a wonder space. Mobilizing Deleuze’s concept of the Baroque to account for the political-aesthetic implications of wonder, I will reconsider the aesthetic limits of visual contemplation in the airport space, thus accounting for the emergence of a novel spatial ecology.