Atmospheric Memory is an artwork by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and his team in Montréal, headed by Stephan Schulz, in collaboration with fluid dynamics scientists Enrico Fonda (NYU), Devesh Ranjan (Georgia Tech) and his students. The work is inspired by English polymath Charles Babbage. In 1838 Babbage proposed that all words ever spoken remain recorded in the atmosphere and that a sufficiently powerful computer could potentially “rewind” the movement of all air molecules to recreate the voices of everyone who has spoken in the past. A series of atmospheric art machines were developed to render tangible this airborne “vast library” of oral history and song.

The project brings to light Babbage’s claims from his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. While Babbage’s vision was only possible in the expired world-view of positivist classical mechanics, his romantic insistence that past and present co-exist, that the air is not neutral, that everything is “printed” and can be recalled, is relevant in poetic, critical and political practices of our time. All cultures have oral traditions that encompass poetry, storytelling and song, —Babbage’s vision emphasizes how these traditions make up who we are and how they accompany us and resonate to what we ourselves say.

The artwork uses techniques to capture the 3D form of air turbulence as it exists the mouth of a volunteer. In 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the song “Au claire de la lune” on the phonautograph, making the first recording of human speech. Here the phrase is depicted as a sculpture to be viewed, rather than heard. Breath exhaled from speaking is 3D scanned to form a solid, which is later printed. Words, phrases, and sounds become moving clouds of vapor, containing layers of complex folds and vortices.

Collective Motion is an image created by artist David McLeod in collaboration with professor Maurizio Porfiri from NYU. The artwork visualizes the behavior of interactive agents, that organize themselves in a collective motion. The concept is related to flocking and schooling and more broadly to non-equilibrium systems undergoing a phase transition. The structured behavior of these active particles bridges the gap between the motion of living things and motion of inactive matter such as in classical fluid dynamics.

Nimbus Atlas by Berndnaut Smilde

A series of slow-motion videos depicting self-made clouds emerging and decomposing in a void. The footage was captured with a high speed camera resulting in a slowed down visualisation on how clouds evolve, change shape and reflect light.

Immutable Swell is a sculptural representation of an ocean wave as it breaks onto land. Karwas created the artwork by extracting over 500,000 data points from a custom buoy sensor placed in the waters of Cape Cod. This data was combined  with her own personal experience of swimming in the ocean to emerge as a complex 3D digital inscription of an ocean wave. By using software and motion analysis to observe the wave from a digital distance, Karwas was able to distill invisible structures in the wave. Immutable Swell represents an opportunity for viewers to make a connection to the powerful turbulence and mysterious patterns found in the ocean.