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If I asked you to picture the air,

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what do you imagine?

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Most people think about either empty space

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or clear blue sky

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or sometimes trees dancing in the wind.

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And then I remember my high school
chemistry teacher with really long socks

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at the blackboard,

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drawing diagrams of bubbles
connected to other bubbles,

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and describing how they vibrate
and collide in a kind of frantic soup.

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But really, we tend not to think
about the air that much at all.

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We notice it mostly

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when there's some kind of unpleasant
sensory intrusion upon it,

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like a terrible smell
or something visible like smoke or mist.

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But it's always there.

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It's touching all of us right now.

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It's even inside us.

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Our air is immediate, vital and intimate.

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And yet, it's so easily forgotten.

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So what is the air?

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It's the combination of the invisible
gases that envelop the Earth,

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attracted by the Earth's
gravitational pull.

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And even though I'm a visual artist,

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I'm interested in
the invisibility of the air.

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I'm interested in how we imagine it,

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how we experience it

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and how we all have an innate
understanding of its materiality

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through breathing.

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All life on Earth changes the air
through gas exchange,

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and we're all doing it right now.

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Actually, why don't we all
right now together take

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one big, collective, deep breath in.

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Ready? In. (Inhales)

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And out. (Exhales)

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That air that you just exhaled,

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you enriched a hundred times
in carbon dioxide.

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So roughly five liters of air per breath,
17 breaths per minute

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of the 525,600 minutes per year,

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comes to approximately
45 million liters of air,

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enriched 100 times in carbon dioxide,

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just for you.

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Now, that's equivalent to about 18
Olympic-sized swimming pools.

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For me, "air" is plural.

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It's simultaneously
as small as our breathing

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and as big as the planet.

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And it's kind of hard to picture.

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Maybe it's impossible,
and maybe it doesn't matter.

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So through my visual arts practice,

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I try to make air, not so much picture it,

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but to make it visceral
and tactile and haptic.

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I try to expand this notion
of the aesthetic, how things look,

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so that it can include things
like how it feels on your skin

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and in your lungs,

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and how your voice sounds
as it passes through it.

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I explore the weight, density and smell,
but most importantly,

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I think a lot about the stories we attach
to different kinds of air.

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This is a work I made in 2014.

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It's called "Different Kinds
of Air: A Plant's Diary,"

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where I was recreating the air
from different eras in Earth's evolution,

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and inviting the audience
to come in and breathe them with me.

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And it's really surprising,
so drastically different.

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Now, I'm not a scientist,

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but atmospheric scientists
will look for traces

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in the air chemistry in geology,

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a bit like how rocks can oxidize,

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and they'll extrapolate
that information and aggregate it,

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such that they can
pretty much form a recipe

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for the air at different times.

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Then I come in as the artist
and take that recipe

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and recreate it using the component gases.

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I was particularly interested
in moments of time

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that are examples
of life changing the air,

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but also the air that can influence
how life will evolve,

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like Carboniferous air.

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It's from about 300 to 350
million years ago.

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It's an era known
as the time of the giants.

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So for the first time
in the history of life,

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lignin evolves.

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That's the hard stuff
that trees are made of.

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So trees effectively invent
their own trunks at this time,

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and they get really big,
bigger and bigger,

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and pepper the Earth,

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releasing oxygen, releasing
oxygen, releasing oxygen,

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such that the oxygen levels
are about twice as high

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as what they are today.

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And this rich air supports
massive insects --

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huge spiders and dragonflies
with a wingspan of about 65 centimeters.

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To breathe, this air is really clean
and really fresh.

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It doesn't so much have a flavor,

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but it does give your body
a really subtle kind of boost of energy.

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It's really good for hangovers.

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(Laughter)

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Or there's the air of the Great Dying --

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that's about 252.5 million years ago,

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just before the dinosaurs evolve.

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It's a really short time period,
geologically speaking,

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from about 20- to 200,000 years.

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Really quick.

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This is the greatest extinction event
in Earth's history,

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even bigger than when
the dinosaurs died out.

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Eighty-five to 95 percent of species
at this time die out,

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and simultaneous to that is a huge,
dramatic spike in carbon dioxide,

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that a lot of scientists agree

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comes from a simultaneous
eruption of volcanoes

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and a runaway greenhouse effect.

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Oxygen levels at this time go
to below half of what they are today,

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so about 10 percent.

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So this air would definitely not
support human life,

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but it's OK to just have a breath.

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And to breathe, it's oddly comforting.

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It's really calming, it's quite warm

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and it has a flavor a little bit
like soda water.

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It has that kind of spritz,
quite pleasant.

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So with all this thinking
about air of the past,

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it's quite natural to start thinking
about the air of the future.

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And instead of being speculative with air

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and just making up what I think
might be the future air,

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I discovered this human-synthesized air.

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That means that it doesn't occur
anywhere in nature,

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but it's made by humans in a laboratory

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for application in different
industrial settings.

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Why is it future air?

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Well, this air is a really stable molecule

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that will literally be part of the air
once it's released,

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for the next 300 to 400 years,
before it's broken down.

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So that's about 12 to 16 generations.

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And this future air has
some very sensual qualities.

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It's very heavy.

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It's about eight times heavier
than the air we're used to breathing.

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It's so heavy, in fact,
that when you breathe it in,

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whatever words you speak
are kind of literally heavy as well,

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so they dribble down your chin
and drop to the floor

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and soak into the cracks.

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It's an air that operates
quite a lot like a liquid.

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Now, this air comes
with an ethical dimension as well.

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Humans made this air,

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but it's also the most potent
greenhouse gas

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that has ever been tested.

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Its warming potential is 24,000 times
that of carbon dioxide,

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and it has that longevity
of 12 to 16 generations.

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So this ethical confrontation
is really central to my work.

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(In a lowered voice) It has
another quite surprising quality.

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It changes the sound of your voice
quite dramatically.

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(Laughter)

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So when we start to think -- ooh!
It's still there a bit.

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(Laughter)

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When we think about climate change,

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we probably don't think about
giant insects and erupting volcanoes

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or funny voices.

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The images that more readily come to mind

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are things like retreating glaciers
and polar bears adrift on icebergs.

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We think about pie charts
and column graphs

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and endless politicians
talking to scientists wearing cardigans.

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But perhaps it's time we start
thinking about climate change

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on the same visceral level
that we experience the air.

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Like air, climate change is simultaneously
at the scale of the molecule,

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the breath and the planet.

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It's immediate, vital and intimate,

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as well as being amorphous and cumbersome.

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And yet, it's so easily forgotten.

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Climate change is the collective
self-portrait of humanity.

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It reflects our decisions as individuals,

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as governments and as industries.

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And if there's anything
I've learned from looking at air,

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it's that even though
it's changing, it persists.

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It may not support the kind of life
that we'd recognize,

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but it will support something.

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And if we humans
are such a vital part of that change,

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I think it's important
that we can feel this discussion.

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Because even though it's invisible,

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humans are leaving
a very vibrant trace in the air.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)