Art meets science at air pollution kiosk

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An orange, powder-coated steel kiosk is going up in downtown Louisville, a new kind of public art that also seeks to inform people about air pollution and inspire them to act on their new knowledge.

Thursday at 4 p.m., a group of artists, big-data analysts and citizen scientists are planning to unveil the new art installation at the intersection of Fourth and Liberty streets.

“We are making the unseen, seen by visualizing air pollution and gamifying it to increase awareness,” said Shagun Singh, with Urban Matter Inc., a Brooklyn-based design studio that designed the visualization and the game.

The Air Bare exhibit will use a touch-screen display and bubbles to visualize Louisville’s air quality and show how it changes throughout the day. The display will show a real-time levels of particulate matter and carbon monoxide in the air. Both pollutants have been linked to asthma and heart disease.

People can pop the air particles to earn points, she said, adding that there will also be a quiz component.

The air pollution data is being pulled from sensors installed by Manylabs, a San Francisco nonprofit produced them, according to the Insitute for Healthy Air, Soil and Water, the project organizer.

The air monitoring data is not official. But Veronica Combs with the institute said the sensors will be more accurate than the Air Quality Eggs it deployed last year.

“I think you can get meaningful information from comparing units at different locations,” said Peter Sand, with Manylabs.

People can go online to see what the monitors are showing at an institute website,louisvilleairmap.com. The orange dots are what feeds the kiosk.

The project is a collaboration of organizations from around the country, including Creative Commons. It gets local help from the Louisville Downtown Partnership, Louisville Metro government and was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Louisville Metro Air Pollution District is not involved. It’s network of air monitors are used to demonstrate compliance with federal clean-air laws. They have shown air quality has improved dramatically over the years, but that Louisville still struggles to comply with the Clean Air Act.

Rejecting recommendations by Kentucky and Indiana, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year decided much of the Louisville area failed to meet its newest clean-air rules for fine particles, for example.

And as many as 25 counties in Indiana, including Clark and Floyd, and 23 in Kentucky, including Jefferson, Bullitt and Oldham, would fail to meet a 65 ppb standard for ozone, proposed by EPA in November.

“The art installation will bring a new element to the discussion of local air quality, and that’s a good thing,” said Tom Nord, spokesman for the district.

The district, he said, “has been working to educate the public about the value of clean, safe air for years, so it’ll be great to see more people join that conversation.”