Making the Invisible Tangible: Joint Art-Science Methods for Materializing Urban Air Pollution

By Alice Jarry, Brice Ammar-Khodja, Jean-Michaël Celerier, Jacqueline Beaumont, Matthew Halpenny, Philippe Vandal

Editor: Ursula Eicker

Upcoming Book Chapter. Book of Abstracts available online: https://www.concordia.ca/content/dam/concordia/next-gen/docs/ngci-encyclopedia-book-of-abstracts-vol-1.pdf

In the current ecological emergency context, air toxicity—a felt but invisible milieu—is a growing issue. Particulate matter and gases generated by transport, construction, or industrial activities have significant impacts on human and more-than-human health (Manisalidis et al., 2020; Montréal, 2022; Canada, 2022), raising socio-environmental questions related to accessibility to a healthy environment (Chen, 2011; Graham, 2015; Liboiron, 2021). How to make air pollution tangible? To address this question, the chapter draws on the case of [re]capture (2020-2024), a research-creation project that comprises a gallery installation and a series of outdoor experiments driven by instruments that capture atmospheric data along the Montreal Metropolitan Expressway (Québec, Canada). Through the lens of ‘air filtration,’ [re]capture explores how data materialization strategies can give shape at once to air’s microscopic invisibility and the macroscopic dimension of its issues. Based on bio-materials investigation and data capture in urban settings, the project involves community workshops, a public exhibition, and a comparative study of air monitoring infrastructures across two sites in Montreal and Paris. With filtration approached as an exchange between materials, technologies, researchers, and publics, the chapter explores how this art-science framework involving the study of scientific instruments can decompartmentalize knowledge to generate sensory and sensitive experiences of air pollution, and how artistic objects can be mobilized to co-create new forms of public experimentation and ecological imaginaries. Examining the links between artistic and scientific practices, the built environment, ecosystems, and communities, it seeks to encourage social uses of research-creation.