Champs d’Ozone, Beijing
2011
Site specific video installation onto holographic film
HeHe – Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen (British & German based in France)
Champs d’Ozone exploits the analytical data that measures the quality of air in Beijing, provided in quasi real time by the Weather Tunnel installed outside NAMOC, and transposes them in a visual and sound space-time continuum. Information on the quality of the air is freed here from its usual cartographic representation; it is diffused by and through it’s original material, the air itself. A computer generated cloud appears to hang over the city, saturated but always changing colour, reflecting the concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, ozone and particle dust suspended in the air.
The reading of the cloud code is left up to the viewer to decipher. Could a red cloud be more toxic than an orange one? Might there be such as thing is zero pollution? As writes Gaston Bachelard, “the substantial imagination of the air is only really active in the dynamic of dematerialization.” Indeed, Champs d’Ozone is a window to think about the mediation of information on air quality and the evolution of pollution as a way of unfolding the history of a particular city. This site specific work opens a phenomenological and sensory field, which brings to the foreground the relationship between the individual and the environment.
Artist bio:
With humour, HeHe reinvent our ongoing technological adventures; from the transformation of energy, emissions, intoxication, rail infrastructures to electronically mediated systems of control. In developing poetic interventions about the limits and meaning of our technologically conditioned world, their practice reconciles the individual with the reality of their immediate urban environment. Their concept of reverse cultural engineering and the idea of aesthetising emission clouds in real time provides a theoretical framework for their installations on transportation (Train Project) and pollution (Nuage Vert, Champs d’Ozone). Working independently, HeHe bring theatre, engineering and design to their art practice and collaborate with individuals from a diverse range of disciplines and interests. Their work has been exhibited at Lyon Biennale, France; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; Luxembourg European Capital of Culture; Galerie Frédéric Desimpel, Bruxelles; San José Museum of Art, USA
www.hehe.org
