Breathe – wearing your air

Breathe – the air we wear proposes wearable and mobile technologies for reading and rendering in real time the air we breathe. The project proposes the ‘actioning’ for better air quality through individuals’ capacity to record air pollution. The project initiates a walk-able protest by taking air quality directly to the individual and through critical mass counter the massive problems facing our urban atmospheres. In particular, the article focuses on the pollution problems facing China today. Keywords; Real time data visualization, wearable environmental sensing devices, personal pollution monitor, civic engagement. Volatile atmospheres ...His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues... The above selected lines by the soldier and poet Wilfred Owen forms his testimonial to the chemical weapon Mustard Gas widely used during WW1. Penned in the last year of the war (1918), Owen’s poem titled Dulce et Decorum Est [1] portrays the effects of breathing the deadly poisonous gas: the burning of the lungs, throat, eyes and skin. Once released from its canister, the yellow coloured gas was at the mercy of the breeze, floating across no man’s land and onto lines of men holed-up in dug out trenches. Often the breeze would shift direction returning to its source and back again. This quite visible air took the lives of the unprepared as they fumbled for their masks. Cut to an image of a number of cities around the world and you will see people wearing white masks and shielding their eyes from vapours in the air. These are not images of war but urban everyday images of people and cities shrouded in the thick haze of air clogged with particles. This we know is air pollution. Once invisible, air has now been rendered visible by pollution, such as the emission of gases and smog from factories, coal-fired plants, car-exhaust fumes, homes and jets. Like Mustard Gas that roamed with the breeze intoxicating men in their trenches, pollution is subject to mass migration within the atmospheric turbulence [2] circling the earth. This natural turbulence: beautiful vortexes, eddy flows and emigrational currents have become the unnatural enemy of people when mixed with pollution. Dramatic as this may sound, air is killing people. The choking of thousands of men assigned to death from Mustard Gas in Owen’s poem finds an echo in the choking of tens of millions assigned to lung and blood diseases from polluted air. The article is divided into five parts. The first, The archaeology of air, explores the visibility of air. The second, “The sociology of air”, discusses the social interaction of the air we share with others. The third part “The capital of air” accounts for air and industry, production and profit. The forth, “Wearing your air” discusses the prototypes under development in our project, the methodologies for wearable ‘urban architectures’ and their implementation in terms of hardware and software, sensing technologies, mapping, domains and user testing. The article concludes with a speculation on “The future of air” and the consequences of living in unstable environments. In particular, the article focuses on the pollution problems facing China. The archaeology of air The years of rapid economic growth and industrial expansion have led to dangerous levels of air pollution in many cities across China. At a workshop in Beijing held on March 31 2013, a study by Global Burden of Disease (GBD) [3] estimated that in 2010 1.2 million premature deaths (40% of total premature deaths in China) and the life loss of 25 million healthy years were attributable to air pollution. According to the GBD research team this ranks China as the single most affected country in the world in terms of health problems stemming from air pollution [4]. The Chinese multimillionaire businessman Chen Guangbiao’s recent marketing campaign (more self promotional than political) to combat the problem by handing out oxygen cans to the public, nevertheless highlighted the endemic situation facing China. Graphically resembling Andy Warhol’s popularisation of the Campbell’s Soup cans, yet operating like Coca-Cola cans where the peeling off the aluminium seal releases the air created images of Beijing’s residents walking the streets inhaling the oxygen not unlike images of teenagers sniffing glue. While it highlighted the problems of air pollution, the oxygen cans campaign inadvertently subverted its message by fetishing the problems of air pollution as only marketing campaigns do. The reality of Beijing’s air pollution is radically changing how its society responds and functions, or perhaps dysfunctions. On days of extreme air pollution in Beijing, children are advised to stay indoors and refrain from attending school or participating in outdoor physical exercise classes. Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, is a platform that attracts young people who communicate their concerns about air quality with hashtags such as: #itsucks and #statedepartment. The use of microblogs and social networks like Weibo confirms a burgeoning level of awareness to Beijing’s extreme air pollution and the problems facing China [5]. Recent announcements by Chinese officials have identified ‘cancer villages’, a term being used to described areas unfit for human inhabitation due to industrial waste and toxic water, soil and air pollution. Beijing is not alone. Mexico City, Lagos in Nigeria, Delhi in India and Salt lake City, Utah have air pollution levels that are also threatening people’s lives. In the city of Ahvaz, Iran, road traffic congestion, heavy industry and oil extraction have created some of the highest readings of air toxicity in the world. Efforts to curb pollution levels during the 1970s in the developed countries (e.g., the city of Los Angeles in the United States) have been overtaken by the rapidly developing countries of India and China. After decades of action, air has in fact become increasingly more harmful and deadly. Pollution is a global condition. Wind currents drive the pollution plumes of industry from their source to locations thousands of kilometres away. Thus China’s pollution reaches America, America’s reaches China, India’s reaches the pacific and all pollution reaches Antarctica home to the largest o-zone hole in the world. The nature of pollution is to ‘fold’ within the turbulence of the urban atmospheres that surround us. To suggest an archaeology of air is not to mount a ‘historical dig’ to discover its roots in the centuries of miasma and foul air [6], or to mine history to understand how air became ‘vandalised’ from the late eighteenth century onwards in the industrial revolution. Rather, the archaeology of air asks us to fathom our present relation-