Cars: Accelerating the Modern World at the V&A

4 Feb 2020

Courtyard intervention outside Cars: Accelerating the Modern World. Courtesy of the V&A Museum, London

Over its short 130-year history, the car has become one of the most loved, contested and influential innovations in the world. It has revolutionised manufacturing, transformed how we move, forever changing our cities, environment and economies, Cars: Accelerating the Modern World exhibition brings together 15 cars to tell extraordinary stories about design and the car’s impact on the world.

We worked closely with architects OMMX, the V&A’s curators Brendan Cormier and Esme Hawes and filmmakers Zuketa and Luke Halls Studio to create a series of sound worlds that helped bring to life the key narratives underpinning the exhibition.

© Max Creasy

Car as concept

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Part of the curatorial concept for Cars was to give as much weight to the historical context the car helped shape as the cars themselves. This was achieved by a complex dramaturgy of over 300 supporting objects, drawings and photographs, 25 archive films, 8 new film commissions and a complex staging of a model city that required the entire design team to work together seamlessly in order to coherently shape the visitor experience as a whole.

© Max Creasy

courtesy of the V&A Museum

Sounding the uncanny

Throughout the exhibition, sound plays a prominent role in not only helping contextualise narratives but also in underscoring the critical discourse which the exhibition as a whole manifests. Unfolding across the entire space, visitors experience a series of sound worlds that often veer towards the uncanny, exposing a subtext of influential cultural themes not explicitly featured in the exhibition, but which are nevertheless implied; from films such as Jaques Tati’s ‘Traffic’ and Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’, the hyperreal sound design of computer driving games and car adverts, subversive musical genres such as Vaporwave and the pop music phenomenon of ‘Drive Time’ to Adam Curtis’s techniques of sound and image juxtaposition in ‘Hypernormalisation’.

courtesy of Luke Halls

Dekotora film by Zuketa film production

You can listen back to the exhibition soundscapes we created for Cars below, and if you’d like to find out more about the museum sound design work we do, head over to our website here