Editorial

Katherine Hunt

Origin: Static Issue 06
Content: Text

'This issue of Static breaks the glass on a fire alarm, and sticks around to listen to the clamour. It seeks to ask whether, and how, alarms can retain their message and urgency in our crowded soundscape, scarred by a permanent state of heightened ‘orange alert’. À l’arme in Old French, or the Italian all’arme, was literally a call to arms: the alarm roused, gathered together, and provoked action and skirmish. The English word ‘alarm’ has come to signify a warning rather than an action. It no longer urges us to go out and fight, but advises us to protect or to scatter. A fire alarm sends disgruntled office workers tramping out on to the pavement; a siren crumples traffic out of the way; and our daily wake-up call, warning us not to be late for work,
abruptly encourages us to do no more than begin our quotidian ablutions. Alarm now denotes not just the signalling noise, but the state of fear and apprehension that surrounds it. This use of the term has a relatively recent etymology, only really breaking free from the original, signal sense of ‘alarm’ in the nineteenth century. But it is this meaning, this reflection of paranoias, false starts, and things to come, that dominates our understanding of the word. ALARM, the U.K.’s ‘National Forum for Risk Management in the Public Sector’, attempts to anticipate any
emergency in fields from health and safety to financial insurance. The U.S. Department for Homeland Security offers ‘30 Tips for Emergency Preparedness’. In this haze of anxiety the ring of an alarm bell, the signal that something really might be wrong after all, comes almost as a relief…'

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Contributor:

Katherine Hunt completed her M.Res. at the London Consortium in 2007 with a dissertation about the sound of church bells in early-Reformation London. She has worked as an Assistant Curator at Tate Britain and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is currently working with the British Museum and Birkbeck, University of London, on a project to catalogue early British printed images.