Air Quality Index as the Stuff of the Political

Sensing Collectives

“…As the fluxes of data generated by automated air quality indexes and new practices of digital environmental sensing open new spaces of perception, we observe how this contributes to novel imaginaries of a datafied urban air, which risks suppressing the heterogeneous but incalculable realities from which the numbers were inferred, while at the same time reconceptualizing the urban air and our relation to it as a "new arena of care and calculation" (cf. Liu, 2017;Whitehead, 2011;Husberg and Marzecová, 2021). In other words, we notice that the aesthetics (the doing of sensorial perception) of new collective ways of sensing urban air in the digital era is generative of a new 'sensing' mode of governance, and thereby inherently political as it radically shapes collective subjectivity and agency.…”

“…Arguably sensorial engagements with polluted air, which is mostly invisible, ask for a different, technoecological approach that acknowledges the immanent relationality between body, technology, and ecology (see, for example, Liu, 2017;Murphy, 2017). Similar to praxeological approaches, practice-based artistic research allows for sensuous or sense-driven and material approaches and inquiries in which the senses and the body are valid sources of research (Hannula et al 2014).…”