My thesis began with the interest to see air as an object. We only notice air when our five senses have been disturbed. Yet we are seeing air and hearing air amongst the things that we see and hear; smelling and touching air amongst the things that we smell and touch. If air is an encompassing generalization just as fabric, mirrors, and toys are, I thought that it is possible to consider a defined mass of air an observable object, similar to a particular piece of fabric characterized by nuanced idiosyncrasies.
My first experimentation to present air was inspired by sound. First, I videotaped different classmates while whistling freely. Then I videotaped the same classmates whistling into seasoning bits and powders that I had prepared. I then edited the footage and linked together the different instances of whistling, which resulted to covered a range of forces and weight in motion. 11
Watching the video, I noticed how strong our tendency is to only see what is visible and moving. When we can’t visualize the air being affected, our attention is directed to the movements and efforts of the person whistling. It is only when the powders act as a visual aid making air partly visible, that our attention gets redirected to the shapes formed by the moving particles.
The quality of air suggests a physicality that is in a different sense than objects that we can hold. Although ungraspable, air possesses an extreme tension to us because we are dependent on it every second. The average person inhales about 40 liters of air per minute, and would completely die if deprived of air for six minutes.
Interested in visualizing this urgency, I tried to write, typewrite, color, and cut up things, all under six minutes. This was also an experiment for not having full control towards the end product of my work. 14
Not satisfied with the result, I came back to this idea again later. I calculated the volume of six minutes of air that a person breaths, which was about 2.4 cubic meters. So I looked for spaces which had the equivalent of this volume where I took videos that were each six minutes long. My intension was to collect as many videos of different spaces as possible and create a video collage. This project was incomplete because at a point it became overly didactic and repetitive. 33
I tried to think about air in different ways in order to understand the visual qualities that it suggests. If air had a color, we would be able to see how we are wrapped in this expansive substance that extends and fills all vacancies unless stopped by a perfectly sealed boundary. In a way, air is like negative space in a composition field.
In a type experiment, I took the counter shapes—or negative spaces—of the typeface Helvetica, and reconfigured these odd pointy shapes to imitate the original letter forms at their best. Because we are familiar with the shapes of alphabets, we have the ability to reposition the counter shapes back into the normal letter forms in our minds. 13
Like negative space, air is always presented to us in fractured occurrences and by the aid of another element. Containers give air visible shapes, but air is none of those shapes. Like the powders, they are containers or translators only capable of revealing a fragmented visual state of air’s qualities. Any attempt to close air in order to visualize its qualities is paradoxical because it lessens the awareness of the rest of the air that’s not contained.
I attempted to map the range of visual manifestations of air based on how we see air. The playlist collection starts with obvious examples, such as smoke, balloons, bottles, and gradually moves to the phenomenal ones, such as rainbow and bread holes. The very last example is a tree, being a symbol of an environment of how air is normally presented to us, all-surrounding but invisible. Then, I attempted to bring what is invisible to the foreground by making a reversal image, so that the areas of negative space that used to be white becomes black; the areas of images that used to be in color become white. While a better balance is achieved in terms of giving negative space more prominence, I realized that we are still unlikely to take the black area as primary because our vision gives dominance to shapes rather than flat colors. 12
Like negative space, it seems that air can only be seen and understood with effort, through metaphors, and probably more accurately, by imagination.
Unlike solid objects, air moves and transforms with the mixture of other particles. Trying to capture the subtlety of this shift, I took a series of photographs of the moving sky from the same position in five second intervals for six minutes. The static color of the sky as well as the shifting of an occasional passing cloud were recorded in a total of forty-five pictures.
With each image, I then zoomed into a single pixel at the same position to compare the change in color value exclusively. I created a book of blue pages that moves through the subtleties in the changing tones of the sky which is difficult to discern in our everyday view. The blue book became the first color book of a series of eight books in total. 15
The sky appears to be blue because of the light refraction that occurs as it enters the atmosphere. It is a false color representation of air or space beyond earth. I thought that the phenomena of seeing light is similar to the screen color technology of RGB. Trying to work with this analogy, I used the program Photoshop to split the color channels of my sky images into red, green, and blue, resulting in three times as much imagery than before. Then, I recombined two channels at a time under the RGB theory. Red and green produced a light yellow; green and blue produced a light blue, red and blue produced a light pink.
The combination of all three color channels produced white, so I made a white blank book in addition to the seven other ones as a response to express the difficulty of seeing air. The white book does not mean anything by itself. Its existence is only justified because of its relationship to the other books. 16