Extract from article by Jessie Bond, published on the RCA website.

MRes RCA introduces students to practice-led interdisciplinary and experimental research processes, helping them position their research within social, historical, cultural and theoretical discourses. For Lucy Sabin, who is on the MRes RCA: Communication Design Pathway, this has resulted in a project that unifies scientific and artistic points of view.

Lucy’s thesis proposes innovative approaches to cartography that move away from land-based maps to focus instead on human relationships with the air and its variations over space and time. She calls this multidisciplinary field of knowledge ‘atmospheric cartography’, and defines atmosphere as both meteorological and emotional.

Coming to study MRes RCA, changed Lucy’s perspective, as she had previously studied an undergraduate degree in French, Spanish and Philosophy. The increased emphasis on visual communication and creativity at the RCA is something she has benefited from: ‘it’s amazing to be able to present my work, which is very philosophical, in the context of professional-level exhibitions held here at the RCA.’

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First published in The Polyphony, hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.

We have a first breath and a last breath. When a newborn baby inflates her lungs for the first time, this moment signals the beginning of a life-long relationship with air. The sudden rush of air flooding into her body leaves a trace of residual air. From then on, she is engaged in regulating a flow of air between inside and outside her body. Most of the time this regulation is involuntary and unconscious.

Breathing is an intra-action in air. We humans do not live in water, nor fire, nor earth. We live in air. We are immersed in the stuff. It is our only habitable element. This simple yet profound observation was made by French philosopher Luce Irigaray. She criticised Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics which conflated solidity with existence without taking air into account (1983). Of course, air is the very precondition for our existence in the first place. There is no being-in-the-world, to quote Heidegger, without air recycling through our bodies (Dreyfus 1990). We may as well speak of being-in-air.  

The title of Irigaray’s book L’oubli de l’air chez Martin Heidegger has been translated into English as The forgetting of air […] (1999). While it is correct to translate ‘oubli’ as ‘forgetting’, the French word can also signify ‘oblivion’. While ‘forgetting’ could be described as a slippage of consciousness that happens from time to time, ‘oblivion’ denotes a state of total unawareness towards surroundings. It is a complete disconnect.

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Sabin, L. (2019). Breathing and Nothingness. The Polyphony [online]. Available at: https://thepolyphony.org/2019/09/12/breathing-and-nothingness/. Accessed: ___.

Part of Pow! Interdisciplinary Collisions symposium at the Royal College of Art, 12th September 2019.

Airspaces – atmospheres – can be weathered and differentiated according to air’s ‘breathability’, which is a possible translation of Luce Irigaray’s ‘valeur respirable’ – literally ‘breathable value’ (1983, 13). Breathability refers to how healthy or not air is to breathe. Often the term ‘quality’ – as in ‘air quality’ – is used to express the same idea. Yet I argue that ‘quality’ in this context acts as a euphemism to gloss over the lived and breathed effects of air pollution. There are three geopolitical points to raise here.   

First, qualifications of the breathability of air are being made at a time when human lungs are constantly exposed to the material flows of transport, industry and other polluting activities. At the time of writing this talk, nine out of ten people worldwide are inhaling polluted air (WHO). So the inevitable ‘acceleration of urban development’ has already changed the ‘aerial and atmospheric matter within which urban inhabitants must live’, writes Human Geographer Peter Adey (2013, 299). Human activity is the main influencer of climate and environment. This is the defining condition of the Anthropocene, our current geological era. Air quality indices, therefore, tend to start from a context of accepting that most of us are always already exposed to airborne contamination. In short, inhaling polluted air is normalised.

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Sabin, L. (2019). Breathable for Whom?: Air Quality in the Geopolitical Arena. Pow! Interdisciplinary Collisions. Royal College of Art, London. Thursday 11th September 2019.

Featured Image: Nazneen Ayubb-Wood.

The time has arrived to finalise plans for ‘making research public’ at the end-of-year exhibition. I will display my thesis (online version in my portfolio) alongside an interactive installation:

Visitors will be able to sit on a park bench with a plaque reading ‘in memory of air’. I wish to represent the public or shared nature of atmosphere as well as the art of pausing to notice. They will listen to a continuous recording of natural breathing, to which their own rhythm of inhales and exhales will necessarily respond.

The install will appear in a room with other incredible works by Communication postgraduate students who are investigating niches like smell and painting, shadow and cinema, memes and culture.

Oh yes, and I’m presenting Atmospheric Cartography at 1.10 pm during the day-long Symposium on Thursday 12th (e-vite below). Artist Nils Norman will be there to respond to our work!!!

Please RSVP if you would like to join any of the week’s events.

MRes RCA Final Show

General exhibition 9th-12th September, all day 10-6

POW! Symposium on interdisciplinary ‘collisions’, Thursday 12th, 10-6

*Private view* on Thursday 12th, 6-8 pm

All at RCA, Kensington, SW7 2EU

E-vite by Pham Thuy Duong (Elly) in After Effects.

Now more than ever, it feels important to ‘go public’ and see how peers receive my research before it is formalised in a written thesis. And so I attended a day workshop run by Architecture students at the RCA: ‘Feeling Planning’.

How do we feel in urban space? How can intimate sensations, emotions and feelings come into discourses around planning for urban futures? Contesting the rational, colonial and gendered history of urban planning and planning law, students from the Master of Research in Architecture at the Royal College of Art invite participation in this colloquium workshop on ‘Feeling Planning’.

Our venue: The Workshop, Lambeth.

In the morning, a multidisciplinary group of postgraduate researchers joined together to give five-minute presentations of their works-in-progress. My presentation was a guided meditation with conscious breathing, using our bodies as a tool to connect with the space in a more nuanced way.

I noticed more similarities than differences between our approaches. For example, we all used mapping to conceptually or visually demonstrate how urban spaces change across spacetimes while drawing attention to interlaced stories of inequality.

All of us at the event were curious about urban planning’s effects on identity and mental health. Nick Bell, a PhD candidate in the RCA’s School of Communication, asked us all a question, which I think revealed the theme of the day. He asked us all to think about what a salutogenic approach to planning would look like (supporting and enhancing human health), as opposed to a pathogenic approach (addressing poor health when it arises).

In the same vein, I wondered what a salutogenic approach to atmosphere would look like… 

Through group discussions following the presentations and around the tea urn, we shared references and tips. Among my copious notes, I have prompts to look up ‘mindful design’ and ‘urban design for mental health’.

Mirrors for sky-gazing. By MRes Architecture students, RCA.

In the afternoon, we went for a short walk through Old Paradise Gardens. The facilitators had fabricated these ingenious mirrors that fit around the nose, below the eyes, so that we could walk while seeing an alternative perspective: the sky between the buildings.

Aesthetically, the experience reminded me of a method for mapping atmosphere that one participant came up with in a recent workshop: to film the sky and a shadow at the same time.

Aerial installation at Room to Breathe with visitors’ stories written on folded paper.

Room to Breathe introduction.

Room to Breathe installation.

Installation about memories and memes of cuisine.

After the colloquium, I visited an exhibition at the Migration Museum, serendipitously also located in The Workshop. ‘Room to Breathe’ explores intimate, domestic stories from ‘generations of new arrivals to Britain’. I emailed the curators to ask why they chose such a title; I can imagine why but I think their answer will be even more interesting.

The dictionary definition for breathing space or breathing room is: ‘a period of rest in order to increase strength or give you more time to think about what to do next’.

My chalk graffiti in Old Paradise Gardens. Part of Feeling Planning.

The word ‘archive’ may conjure up images of yellowing documents collecting dust or avenues of shelves and filing cabinets. While many archives do take this rather tame shape and form, others defy the stereotype. 

After exploring several different workshops and public engagement formats, I have identified this optimal approach to carry forward. Atmosphere Mapping is an ideation workshop which aims to develop alternative processes for engaging with fluctuations in our airy environs over space and time. The half-day session comprises three parts: a lecture, prototyping, and a presentation/discussion. 

The lecture provides a critical understanding of atmosphere. The latter is of course meteorological, constantly fluctuating with material flows influenced by human activity indistinguishable from the weather patterns of a changing climate. It is also aesthetic and emotionally-charged. As our medium for living, atmosphere is an opportunity for engineering cleanliness and protection as well as socioeconomic inequity and uninhabitable spacetimes.

In the lecture, I showcase existing techniques for sensing and recording atmosphere, where sciences and arts intermingle. An example from my own practice of mapping atmosphere is biomonitoring with lichens. I emphasise that cartography is about making choices of what to represent and how; it is, therefore, a ‘world-making’ project of political significance.

After the lecture, participants have a set amount of time, usually 90 minutes, to ideate and prototype their own process of mapping an aspect of the atmosphere they inhabit which is significant to them. So far, I have completed the workshop with MA Sustainable Design students at Brighton University and with fellow MRes Communication Design students.

Ideation taking place. Atmosphere Mapping at the RCA.

Beyond art and design courses, I can envisage adapted versions of the workshop taking place in shared spaces such as offices, schools, and neighbourhoods. The main benefit of the Atmosphere Mapping, in terms of participant experience and research value, is the opportunity and creative means to articulate ambient conditions which are otherwise taken for granted, despite negative effects on wellbeing. A straightforward example is noise pollution, but there are countless others.

Participants at Brighton University worked in groups to present ways of sensing and recording noise pollution’s effect on stress levels (there was a building site nearby). They also established a ‘creative climate’ index based on criteria for optimum studio conditions. At the RCA, participants worked individually and came up with more introspective methods, such as simultaneously filming the sky and a shadow to show the correlation in a rather poetic way (see video above).

After both workshops a sense of calm was remarked upon. The atmosphere reminded me of teaching yoga, when practitioners experience an afterglow following sustained conscious breathing.

Lungs and Landscapes was the least structured workshop I have taught so far, which seems fitting when your subject of study is something so elusive and literally airy as atmosphere.

What happened this morning can be described as a walking and breathing workshop with the RCA’s Expedition Society. I was asked to collaborate with the Society for Mental Health Awareness Week.

Our focus on atmosphere attuned us to Prana – that’s universal shared energy in yogic philosophy. We acknowledged that breathing isn’t just a human activity; parks themselves are sometimes described as the ‘lungs’ of a city.

For a little while, we sat to breathe consciously together in a dappled glade, inhaling the oxygen generated by the giant trees… I think that this interlude of pranayama (control/extension of life force) heightened our responsiveness to atmospheric connections.

Here are some of my memories:

• small seeds floating in the air
• bright colours accentuated by clear skies
• sound of willow leaves in the air like swishy wind chimes
• ripples across a pond where air breaks and texturises the surface of water
• the glare of the sun on one of the first ‘hot’ days of the year
• feeling the relative coolness of the shade on my bare arms

Contemplating a cloud.

Archives of Curiosity is a book written by researchers in the School of Communication (myself included) who have conducted field research in an archive.

My chapter is about biosensing atmosphere with lichen as a method for material engagement with atmospheric pollution, and how it changes over time. Specifically, I embarked on field research in the Natural History Museum’s herbarium, to see how ecosystems have responded to changes in atmospheres across the UK since the Clean Air Act in 1956. I was lucky to interview a Botanist who has worked at the Museum for the last half-century.

Our proud team of writers.

Photos: The talented Thuy Duong Pham (Elly).