Art made of the air we breathe

If I asked you

to picture the air,

what do you imagine?

Most people think about

either empty space

or clear blue sky,

or sometimes trees dancing in the wind.

And then I remembered
my high school chemistry teacher

with really long socks at the blackboard,

drawing diagrams of sort of bubbles
connected to other bubbles,

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

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

We notice it mostly when there's
some kind of unpleasant

sensory intrusion upon it,

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

But it's always there.

It's touching all of us right now.

It's even inside us.

Our air is immediate, vital, and intimate,

and yet, it's so easily forgotten.

So what is the air?

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

attracted by the Earth's
gravitational pull.

And even though I'm a visual artist,

I'm interested in
the invisibility of the air.

I'm interested in how we imagine it,

how we experience it,

and how we all have an innate
understanding of its materiality

through breathing.

All life on Earth changes the air

through gas exchange,

and we're all doing it right now.

And actually, why don't we all right now
together take one big, collective,

deep breath in. Ready?

In.

And out.

So that air that you just exhaled,

you enriched a hundred times
in carbon dioxide.

So roughly five liters of air per breath,

17 breaths per minute,

of the 525,600 minutes per year,

comes to approximately
45 million liters of air

enriched a hundred times in carbon dioxide

just for you.

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

For me, air is plural.

It's simultaneously
as small as our breathing

and as big as the planet.

And it's kind of hard to picture.

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

So through my visual arts practice,

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

but to make it visceral and tactile

and haptic.

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

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

and in your lungs,

and how your voice sounds
as it passes through it.

I explore the weight, density, and smell,

but most importantly, I think a lot
about the stories that we attach

to different kinds of air.

So this is a work that I made in 2014,

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

where I was recreating the air
from different eras

in Earth's evolution,

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

and it's really surprising,

so drastically different.

Now, I'm not a scientist,

but atmospheric scientists
will look for traces

in their air chemistry in geology,

a bit like how rocks can oxidize,

and they'll extrapolate that
information and aggregate it

such that they can pretty much form
a recipe for the air at different times.

Then I come in as the artist
and take that recipe

and recreate it using the component gases.

I was particularly interested

in moments of time that are examples

of life changing the air,

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

like Carboniferous air.

So it's from about 300
to 350 million years ago.

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

So for the first time
in the history of life,

lignin evolves.

Now, that's the hard stuff
that trees are made of.

So trees effectively invent
their own trunks at this time,

and they get really big,
bigger and bigger,

and pepper the Earth,

releasing oxygen, releasing
oxygen, releasing oxygen

such that the oxygen levels are about
twice as high as what they are today.

And this rich air supports
massive insects,

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

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

It doesn't so much have a flavor,

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

It's really good for hangovers.

Or there's the air of the great dying.

So that's about 252.5 million years ago,

just before the dinosaurs evolve,

and it's a really short time period,
geologically speaking,

from about 20 to 200,000 years,

really quick.

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

even bigger than when
the dinosaurs died out.

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

and simultaneous to that

is a huge, dramatic spike
in carbon dioxide

that a lot of scientists agree
come from a simultaneous

eruption of volcanoes
and a runaway greenhouse effect.

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

so about 10 percent.

So this air would definitely not
support human life,

but it's okay to just have a breath,

and to breathe, it's oddly comforting.

It's really calming. It's quite warm,

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

It has that kind of spritz,
quite pleasant.

So with all this thinking
about air of the past,

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

and instead of being speculative with air

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

I discovered this human synthesized air.

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

but it's made by humans in a laboratory

for application in different
industrial settings.

Why is it future air?

Well, this air is a really stable molecule

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

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

So that's around about
12 to 16 generations.

And this future air has some
very sensual qualities.

It's very heavy.

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

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

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

so they dribble down your chin
and drop to the floor

and soak into the cracks.

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

Now this air comes
with an ethical dimension as well.

Humans made this air,

but it's also the most
potent greenhouse gas

that has ever been tested.

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

and it has that longevity
of 12 to 16 generations.

So this ethical confrontation
is really central to my work.

It has another quite surprising quality.

It changes the sound
of your voice quite dramatically.

(Laughter)

So when we start to think --
ooh, it's still there a bit.

(Laughter)

When we think about climate change,

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

or funny voices.

The images that more readily come to mind

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

We think about pie charts
and column graphs

and endless politicians
talking to scientists wearing cardigans.

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

on the same visceral level
that we experience the air.

Like air, climate change is simultaneously

at the scale of the molecule,

the breath, and the planet.

It's immediate, vital, and intimate,

as well as being amorphous

and cumbersome.

And yet, it's so easily forgotten.

Climate change is the collective
self-portrait of humanity.

It reflects our decisions as individuals,

as governments, and as industries,

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

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

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

but it will support something,

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

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

because even though it's invisible,

humans are leaving
a very vibrant trace in the air.

Thank you.

(Applause)