Might we think of air as an unyielding substance, a dull weight that impresses itself upon our bodies, extending a constant and infinite pressure on the minute topographies of our skins? What then of our motion within space, our eternal struggle to create a space for ourselves in the quicksand-air which is immediately closed-over even before space is created? And now this: a new and frightful condition experienced across the globe, the pressurized and policed spaces of pandemic quarantine? Many island countries — including Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United Kingdom — have utilized quarantine hotels in their management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The bubble spaces of quarantine hotels present a compelling frontier as we navigate new spatial divisions of society along epidemiological lines. How do we sense these spaces from the inside of our bodily and imaginative experience, and how do we reconcile those experiences with the protection of the bubble and its ultimate defensive purpose?

Bubble-occupants experience increased levels of stress arising from a compromised capacity to experience public space and from the constant failure of total existential assurance through gaps in public health systems and processes.¹ The stress arising from these spatial scenarios may lead to anaesthetizing outcomes such as self-enclosure, isolation, and passivity²; tales from those interred convey feelings of avoidance and ostracism.³ In the media, these spaces have been of particular interest, with a stream of images conveying the quarantine hotel as a space of detention and entrapment. People have pressed hand-written signs against windows to communicate their plight to the outside world; we have watched their expressions as they gaze beyond their bubbles of segregated air.

Quarantine hotels sit at a distinctly uncomfortable juncture between detention, tourism, and domesticity. These spaces, sometimes tiny and often without openable windows, are fraught environments awash with the faint currents of suspicion born of separation — them and us, in and out. The individual rooms of the quarantine hotel are vacuous and threatening bubbles of high tension and high anxiety — a condition that fits within a long history of air-related anxiety that includes transmission of disease to transcendent utopias. Each is a space of potential, a space on the verge of something: leakage, contamination, evacuation, implosion?

Distinct edges of separation and our individual familiarity with the spatial setting of the quarantine hotel room collapse boundaries between our own experience and that of others. It is a process that is both presumptuous and empathetic. The air takes on a chimerical quality as we grasp its multiplicate extent through our readings of images that appear before us, as well as through our imaginations: bubbles merge into each other, morphing and multiplying until they become either giant trembling masses that inevitably collapse under the weight of their own fragility, or vast fluid volumes of suffocating foam that extend across the landscape, simultaneously forming and negating whole communities. In the face of this bleak bubble-multiplication — this quivering impossibility of super-bubbles or of death-by-foaming — how do we speak from the interior of the quarantine bubble experience? How do we move beyond the epidemiological reasoning from which this isolation arises, to understand how such spaces may be sensed imaginatively and experientially?

“Instead of merely casting the air as an object of science, we need to understand its resistance to a distancing and objectifying take, its stickiness that always already implies and engulfs the observer.”⁴

Air is often understood as a void, as interval, absence or even emptiness, but it is the opposite.⁵ It is a pervasive substance, expanding through every crack and crevice of the built world, penetrating all biological and mechanical systems and surfaces. It is a material to be negotiated, breathed, stirred and contained — and not just material, but a sustaining medium of life.⁶ The air is, as Steve Connor notes, our fundamental “living room.”⁷ In this “living room” — the triangulated space of the quarantine hotel that sits between detention, tourism, and domesticity — we find a potent illustration of what Peter Sloterdijk describes as a “spatialised immune system.”⁸ Such a system protects against the influences of the outer world and simultaneously relates discrete worlds in a form of connected isolation. The forced conduct of everyday life in a touristic setting enables the quarantine hotel to become what Robert Mugerauer identifies as a kind of “receiver” in the anthropotechnological world: a space that is simultaneously a means to immunize us, as well as a conduit of self-stressing in relation to ecological, economic, political, and production-consumption news.⁹ Each of us, whether we are checked in or not, are caught within a precarious and changeable network of bubbles. The air quivers and shifts; it sneaks and distorts.

In the living room of the quarantine hotel, we cocoon ourselves in an interior atmosphere, content in the knowledge that with doors and windows closed — and with other bodies absent — our air is more or less our own. This cocooning is a comfortable form of withdrawal, from air and from community.¹⁰ It is a cocoon in which air pressure differentials are systematically introduced along the edges of our air to segregate, defend, and control. In conditioned buildings, air is segregated such that on the private inside, negative pressure is generated against the public air on the outside, which is a positive pressure. The inside-air is prevented from mingling with the outside-air not only in the obvious delineations of internal and external space, but also across the full range of spatial gradients between living room and balcony, living room and corridor, corridor and foyer, and foyer and outside world. These pressure differentials are not visually evident but are instead sensed. This partitioned air articulates a space formed by and filled with air that defines an expanded space for the body and the breath — but also, as space-under-pressure, a sense of imminent potentiality and intense anxiety of what-might-be: “something ajar in the face of brutal closure.”¹¹

Air management systems support the connected isolation of multiple dwelling places and establish new spatial relationships of atmosphere that respond to material delineations of space. They also create new structures that surpass conventional conceptions of architecture. In these structures, there’s a clear shift in the way architecture is materialized, from the heavy to the light — and the floating and the ephemeral — where architectural space emerges as increasingly atopological, ungrounded, and airy.¹² In this shift our attention moves beyond surface and form and becomes myopic — neurotically, perhaps, we closely attend to the tiny gaps and absences that we would not normally register.

We know that air bounces, vibrates, and transmits¹³; in Helen Mallinson’s words, “it moves me, and I move in it.”¹⁴ The way in which we sense the air from moment to moment is indirect, and it is nearly always interpreted through sensory inference. We often forget the air entirely, and when we do summon it to consciousness we engage with it sensorially — the sight of a chest rising and falling, the sound of air rushing into the body, a disturbance in the atmosphere felt by the skin. In the strange space of an enclosed balcony (a common feature of many quarantine hotels) sensory inference becomes confused. As a casualty of adaptation or poor design, the enclosed balcony confounds the usual visual, auditory, haptic, and olfactory connections to the outside world. Our anticipation of experiencing the outside-air is established visually, by looking from inside to outside, but then denied through the discovery of unopenable fixed windows. These spaces deny what Pallasmaa refers to as the vital “specialisations of the skin” in sensing space¹⁵; in the enclosed balcony, the skin is denied the opportunity to interact with and respond to the body of air that the eyes afford. Instead, we hover there, seeing the world, but unable to listen with our skins as the texture, weight, density, and temperature of the air is imagined from the space of negative pressure.

At the other precipice, the entry door, there’s an equally tense situation. Looking through the peephole is an unnatural gesture in a highly concentrated spatial setting; the gesture demands a furtive movement, an awkward posture and a quiet, secretive surveillance of space beyond — an opposite condition to the balcony, where eyes gaze from the outside-air to the inside-air. At the peephole, squinting while standing on tip-toes or perhaps stooping, perhaps barely breathing, the pressure differentials between inside and outside are palpable. The fisheye lens distorts the space beyond the door; what is known to be straight is viewed as warped. Our sense of architecture changes as trivial features loom large — cornice and skirting skew, patterns leap off surfaces, switches dominate. It is not a quiet mass of air out there; viewed from the space of segregated air, it presses in and exerts its weight sensorially. It threatens intrusion.

As we stand there considering the ramifications of opening the door, uncomfortably caught between two masses of pressurized air held back only by the slender volume of the door, how has our sense of air changed through the experience of this quarantine space? Perhaps air has lost its innocence and its furtive affect. No longer forgotten, perhaps it is dragged into what Sloterdijk refers to as a realm of “mutual poisoning”¹⁶ — and with it, us. At the threshold, we are pushed and pulled in a kind of “experiential purgatory”¹⁷; the way forward is as difficult as our retreat. We open the door of the quarantine hotel room and do not encounter the joyous confluence of individuals emerging from isolation, but instead face a grim anxiety in which all the partitioning, segregation, and control is finally relinquished in one catastrophic, engulfing diffusion that comprehensively destroys our trust in air. The inevitable bodily and atmospheric failures in holding the air back from itself in both real and imaginative terms ensure that any leakage, contamination, evacuation, and implosion is sensed by all who are hopelessly immersed within networks of pressurized air. In the quarantine hotel and beyond, we are entirely at the mercy of air and its complex character that gives — and takes — at every exchange.