Interspecifics
Aire v.3_CDMX
With the video work Aire v.3_CDMX, Interspecifics visualize the invisible: air pollution. Using data provided by The Resource Watch predictive system (designed by NASA and the World Resource Institute), the collective developed a machine learning-generated video driven by patterns found in the pollution data for Mexico City, Bogota, and Sao Paulo—three of the most polluted cities in Latin America. Anchoring the work is the startling fact that, in Mexico, air pollution is related to 48,332 premature deaths per year (IHME, 2019). The Resource Watch data is also used to generate the accompanying soundtrack for the work. The video has three parts, starting with drone-level views of the city from above—from the rooftops and of the skyline; followed by a human-level view inside the city; and finally a geographic visualization that traverses a cross-section of one of the largest cities in the world. During the course of the video, many different excerpts of information flicker across the screen, in English and Spanish, including live data feeds used to generate the work.
Interspecifics are a nomadic, multi-national collective experimenting with generative audio-visual projects at the intersection between visual art and science. They’re based in Mexico City, but they maintain ongoing collaborations with scientists and researchers in Europe and across Latin America. They seek out and nurture a hybridized practice, blending different disciplines and often involving the analysis and simulation of living organisms; open knowledge and the development and distribution of digital tools; and critical social issues as points of inquiry. Their research also involves the use of sound to understand the bioelectrical activity of different bacterial consortiums, plants, slime molds, and humans, by using machine learning and custom hardware the collective calls “ontological machines”.