Title: Human Sensor
Artist(s): Kasia Molglas
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): Air pollution
This performance piece visibilises urban air pollution through a combination of a dance performance and wearable environmental sensors. The environmental sensors monitor air pollution, and the wearable costumes involve a mask that both monitors the air quality of the artist wearing the costume, and allows the costume to visually respond to the wearer’s respiration. It therefore revealed to urban audiences the visibility of environmental air pollution, while involving the performers in themselves being affected by the pollution. In this way, the project held a sense of complicity – at once the audience were given an aestheticisation of air pollution, yet in visibilising the pollution data, the audience was also aware that the performers were in real-time being subjected to that pollution. In this way, the Human Sensor work is a very visceral way of communicating a key environmental issue in contemporary urban contexts.