https://lisbonarchitecturetriennaleiscteiul.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/nancy-jpg/

Wearing your air exhibition for the Lisbon Architecture Triennale Close, Closer brought to association air and breath, pollution and people through an inner and outer materialisation. The exhibition consisted of showing the main components and hardware of a prototyped ‘brooch’ enabling immediate rendering, in real-time, the air particles per micrometre (PM 2.5) of air quality onto people’s bodies. Comprising of sensing technologies that included: Arduino microcontroller board, LED (Light emitting diode) PCB (printed circuit board), real-time GPS mapping and photoelectric sensors, the prototype enabled a working prototype of wearing your air project. Configured as a body extension, the ‘brooch’ was coupled with the visualisation of urban atmospheres through ten LED micro monitors that displayed in real-time air pollution levels from ten cities in China. To monitor the pollution levels and record the pollution readings of the ‘brooch’ on-line software was developed to gather and display the data that allowed people to become informers, renderers and surveyors of the air they breathe.

Developed over twelve months, the assembled technologies brought together the overall concept of wearing your air. To bring awareness to air pollution and the air we breathe, an accompanying interior representation of the body and air was conceived. Assembled from chest X-rays and formed into a ‘spinal’ curve, the installation retorted human presence as a site of transparency and exchange between an inside-outside dialectic. Displaying a simulacrum to the ephemerality of air through medicine’s recordings of breath and lungs, disease and damage, the installation give presence to the interior of the body as a voided illuminated space. Integrating the workings of the brooch worn outside the body with a representative interior of the body collectively pooled our thinking and politics. The project positions and extends existing research of the effects of air pollution through an interaction between people and pollution. Wearing your air exhibition at the Lisbon Architecture Triennial brought its theme of Close, Closer by highlighting the unpredictable interior environments and increasingly volatile urban atmospheres that oscillate around us.

Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013
Venue: ISCTE Lisbon University Institute Gallery
Curator: Professor Sara Eloy
Benedict Anderson, Nancy Diniz
Faculty of Architecture Design and Building University of Technology,
Sydney, Australia and the Department of Architecture, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China.

Lisbon Architecture Triennale
www.trienaldelisboa.com/en/