Sustained Turbulence: AIRE v.3

Aire v.3 is a machine learning generated audiovisual album driven by patterns found in pollution data levels in different cities around the world: Mexico City, Bogotá, and São Paulo. All data is provided by the Resource Watch predictive system, designed by the World Resource Institute and NASA.

Interspecifics created a series of sounds and visual compositions showing the dynamics of air pollutants in each of these three cities. The first stage of the project consists of an A/V experience in 10-minute segments showing cityscapes made from 3D map elevations and satellite imagery, accompanied by generative sound compositions. Pollutants are analyzed on a saturation scale and assigned a sound identity on their own that responds to the dataflow through modulation or control signal. The most relevant and particular patterns detected by our customized machine learning tool are used to trigger and mute the sound events as they occur, establishing the structure of the entire composition.

Aire v.3 was created with support from the air quality department of the World Resource Institute Mexico under the direction of Dr. Beatriz Cárdenas.

This work was first curated in FLEFF 2022.


Interspecifics is a nomadic multispecies collectivity experimenting in the intersection between art and science. It embraces hybridized practices among different disciplines and living organisms, open knowledge and precarity as a challenge. In the quest to know more how reality is been shaped, it considers the relation observer and observed share as part of the same phenomenon; a unique entity in constant indetermination in which the moment of conscious observation entangles us opening one of all the infinite possibilities that weaves in front of our eyes. In this sense, to choose working from the material agency of other organisms is to illustrate and encourage these dialectic relations with sound as a transducer bridge beyond language allowing us to experiment the difference in the otherness through our own body.