Mary Widener, Garrett Kocourek, Meghan Berger, Laura Bogyay, Madison Sveum, and Allie Getty, “Breath: Environmental Data-Driven Kinetic Sculptures”
Mentor: Nathaniel Stern, Art & Design
Poster #138

The numbers surrounding pollution, electronic waste, sustainable energy, and climate change are so vast that they are difficult to fathom. Our research aims to embody such data at a human scale, creating a literal moving empathy with our environments. It asks for us to engage with plants, waste, or greenhouse gasses on an intimate level, and to act towards that change on a global scale. We are working on a series of kinetic sculptures that embody developing ecological data: for example, moss sighing at the rate of oxygen production in Brazil, shoes cantering to the quality of air in the room or laptops palpitating to the number of lives lost to Cobalt mining. These sculptures require careful research and experimentation around the data used, the movements those numbers make, materials, mechatronics, code, and the qualifying texts that accompany them.