INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING EFFECT examines how sound, surface, and spectacle operate as conditioning forces across everyday environments—from production floors and rock stages to airshows and recruitment spaces. The project approaches these encounters through the lens of visual culture studies, which understands images, patterns, and sensory atmospheres as active agents in shaping perception, behaviour, and desire.

My experience of this conditioning emerged through many early influences, long before I encountered it in workplace settings. As a child, I built military aircraft scale models—carefully assembling F‑16s and other fighter jets from kits, painting them, and learning their shapes, markings, and aerodynamic profiles by hand. That early hobby quietly primed my fascination with military technology, embedding the visual and tactile vocabulary of aircraft bodies into my imagination well before I had critical language for it.

This layering of early influences later intersected with my time as an unskilled labourer in a Saskatoon manufacturing facility assembling prefabricated camp trailers for the oil‑patch industry. The workspace was permeated by background music broadcast through overhead speakers: Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, Van Halen, Metallica—high‑energy tracks chosen to animate the shop floor, lift spirits, and accelerate the pace of work. This sound environment created a kind of manufactured momentum, a socially constructed optimism layered over the physical demands of production. In retrospect, the music acted as an atmospheric tool, calibrating mood and rhythm much like a film score shapes emotion without calling attention to itself.

In military recruitment and promotional cinema, the strategic blending of orchestral film scores with recognizable heavy‑metal signatures adds an additional layer of aesthetic authority and cultural charge. The combination doesn’t simply heighten drama; it aligns military representation with the same masculine social codes embedded in amplified‑music cultures, projecting toughness, swagger, and emotional intensity.

From a labour‑studies perspective, the music in the shop also functioned as a workplace management technique—an informal form of pace‑setting and morale regulation embedded in the daily fabric of waged labour. These cues circulated socially as well as sonically, reinforcing postures of toughness, stamina, and camaraderie. For me, they intertwined with the persistent residue of adolescent self‑protection, shaped by growing up within the structured social codes of suburban masculine culture where knowing riffs, bands, and visual styles acted as shields, signals, and social currency.

This shaping of perception through sound has long been intertwined with the visual logic of spectacle—something I encountered repeatedly growing up near Chilliwack, BC, through the freight‑train graphics, metal‑band iconography, and the choreographed bravado of the Abbotsford Airshow. Airshows, in particular, are rich sites for visual‑culture inquiry: fighter jets flying in formation, dazzling paint schemes, and highly engineered aesthetics designed to produce awe. Demonstration teams often appear in special air‑show livery—bright, high‑contrast patterns created not for camouflage but for maximum visual impact, transforming military technology into a public‑facing performance of precision, heroism, and national pride.

These experiences converged when I began experimenting with the iconic “Frankenstein” stripe pattern of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar. The irregular, improvised geometry of his instrument felt deeply connected to both the high‑energy music of my work environment and the graphic spectacle of airshow aesthetics. By reworking this stripe system into a fighter‑jet camouflage pattern, I created a hybrid surface that merges rock virtuosity with military display culture. The result occupies an ambiguous space between camouflage and advertisement, technical surface and fan graphic, seduction and critique.

At the same time, I found myself drawn into an unexpected—and admittedly awkward—dialogue between Eddie Van Halen’s graphic language and the disciplined geometric systems of Piet Mondrian. The two names even resonate humorously, as if “Van Halen” might be a rogue cousin in the Dutch modernist lineage. In art school, Mondrian represented refinement, order, and the pursuit of universal harmony; Van Halen, by contrast, represented adolescent identity, speed and the ecstatic chaos of overdriven, harmonically saturated sound. Bringing these systems together revealed a collision between the formal art‑historical canon and the sonic/visual worlds that shaped me.

This conceptual tension appears literally in the work: several pieces in the series stage a physical confrontation between the two visual languages. A canvas painted in Van‑Halen‑inspired camouflage is pierced by a separate painting referencing a Mondrian composition, the latter jutting into and interrupting the former. The gesture is deliberately blunt—an impalement rather than a blending—reflecting the lived frictions of moving between working‑class environments shaped by rock spectacle and the formal theoretical frameworks of art history.

A related piece borrows from Richard Hamilton’s “POW” explosion. A 1:20 scale model F‑16 Falcon jet is embedded into the canvas, its nose driven into the pop‑art blast. This gesture connects directly to the childhood practice of building aircraft models—now reactivated as a sculptural vocabulary to expose the spectacle, violence, and fantasy coded into military representation.

Another component of the project involves DIY CD‑Rs with label art based on heavily modified Mondrian compositions. Each disc contains sound loops built from recognizable Van Halen guitar fragments, including the iconic opening of “Hot for Teacher.” These disc‑objects circulate as hybrid artifacts bridging bootleg culture, art‑school formalism, and the formative listening environments that shaped me.

To extend this inquiry into spatial experience, I developed a drawing‑based mock‑up of a recruitment vestibule constructed from two repurposed F‑16 fuselages, stood upright tail‑end down and joined as a temporary pavilion. Inspired by the small structures seen at airshows where spectators meet pilots, collect memorabilia, or take photos, the fuselage‑based vestibule exaggerates the interface between military display, public enthusiasm, and spectacular architecture. Wrapped entirely in Van‑Halen‑inspired camouflage, it becomes a site where attraction and critique coexist.

Through these combined elements, INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING EFFECT examines how amplified music, graphic patterning, art‑historical form, and militarized display shape our sensory expectations and understandings of power. The VH Suite traces these intersections across labour, spectacle, sound, and design, asking how such environments imprint themselves on the body and persist long after the moment of encounter.