Tactical Interventions: Environmental Sensing and Socially-Engaged Arts

Abstract

Restless with my artistic output of participatory gallery-based installations that engaged audiences about broader issues around energy and resources in crisis, I’ve recently shifted my practice toward working directly with communities in addressing their local environmental problems. Appropriating the popularity of citizen science and do-it-yourself making as tactics for engagement, this new work builds upon an important history of engineered artworks and activist strategies to make environmental sensing devices with community participants. Airtracs is a two-year community-based project that uses electronic toys as a starting point for dialogue and hands-on learning about the cradle-to-grave life cycle of electronics. The project then progresses to air quality monitoring, augmenting remote control toy trucks (rovers) equipped with cellular networking and inexpensive sensors to push data to a server. The rovers are created by youth participants living in an environmental justice community with a long-time struggle with the City of Albany and the State of New York to reduce the air pollution in their neighbourhood. Building upon a history of similar art and activist initiatives, this paper demonstrates how these community-based projects challenge regulatory standards in air quality assessment, confronting the controversies and critical issues revolving around calibration and data quality of low-cost sensing devices.