Silvia Boscolo | Alessandra Ferragina | Erika Rossi | Maria Chiara Toncich
This ambient installation gives a sense of the smog in four cities.
Through an interactive interface the user selects a month, day, and quarter hour. The system derives, from the internet through an RSS feed, the pollution data for that time. Polystyrene beads are then blown upwards from the floor with an intensity proportional to the recorded smog level.
In the prototype, the result of a day’s work, a hairdryer blew polystyrene beads up into a vertical tube of transparent plastic. No satisfactory RSS feed was found, so an array of pollution downloaded from www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/publicepisodes.asp was used to drive the prototype. Its behaviour manifested the pollution levels on three consecutive quarter-hours.
