'Digioxide' Is an Art Solution to Cities' Quiet Air Quality Acquiescence

I live in some woods and, frankly, that's pretty great—but my earlier years were spent in some large part in and around locales like Detroit, Baltimore, Portland, and a region of Colorado that was constantly on fire, to the point where idyllic mountain life could become eye-watering with a midday change in wind direction. Mostly, that's how air pollution works: you know when it arrives, whether that's the result of stepping out of Penn Station in August after a weekend in Vermont, or perhaps the rapid onset of a pollution-capturing inversion layer, as might beset the valleys and basins home to places like Salt Lake City (boasting arguably the United States' worst air, believe it or not), Los Angeles, and Phoenix. This is to say little of rapidly-industrializing Chinese cities, some of which might make Los Angeles on a bad day seem like the top of Mount Everest.

When you're in these places, just living a life as a relatively healthy human, the pollution can become an invisible force. You just get used to it. There's an argument to be made that if no one ever got sensitized to urban pollution and daily life was just constant sensory confrontation, maybe then we would finally get rid of it, starting with the herds of cars. The dealing-with-it and budgeting of a chronic condition is a different set of experiences than acute trauma. We treat the latter as an emergency: fuck the bill, just stop the bleeding. A slowly festering wound and, hey, maybe it can go another couple of days.

Dmitry Morozov's Digioxide project isn't so much a solution as a nod to the problem. It's also an art project. Zach Sokol over at Motherboard's sister site the Creator's Project explains:

:vtol:, aka Dmitry Morozov, has previously turned tattoos into experimental instruments and highlighted the beauty of barcodes. Now, with Digioxide, the Russian artist is turning pollution recognition into tangible artwork. The portable device is equipped with sensors that measure air pollution gases and dust particles. It's connected to a computer via bluetooth and turns information about the concentration of dust and harmful gases such as CO, CO2, HCHO, CH4 and C3H8 into generative graphics, forming an abstract image.

Digioxide has a mobile printer that allows the pollution data to be turned into physical prints of the digitized images—pixilated, colored graphics that offer a "snapshot" of the surrounding air. :vtol: explains that the tool allows users to "freely move around a city, seek out ecologically problematic places, and turn their data into digital artworks."

While it may be the first to incorporate Max/MSP's video-fucking add-on Jitter, Digioxide isn't alone, at least in its hunt for bad air. Mobile pollution sensing is a field being aggressively pursued by the US EPA and plenty of other agencies, entrepeneuers, and technology creatives. A Google search reveals way too many current and upcoming air sensing technologies to bother summarizing, but it's reasonable to say that the near future will deliver a densely-mapped pollution landscape to (and from) the smart-phone (or kite) of really anyone.

The problem, as always, is getting those anyones to effect the kind of change that might one day make hyper-robust sensing of urban air quality unnecessary. Maybe that's the opening for art, not the technology, but the power of a strange viewpoint—as strange, perhaps, as that first huff of Provo, Utah after a day spent skiing in the pristine air of the Wahsatch Mountains, towering safely above the brown exhaust dome of the Salt Lake Valley below.