The Breathing City Project: drawing interpretations from the atmosphere - patterns of behavior and the negotiation of knowledge

Zschenderlein’s and Rose’s paper discusses the creative and exploratory dialogue and emerging developments of the collaborative process of the arts and science cross-disciplinary collaborative project of The Breathing City, brings together diverse fields of research and practice ranging from sonic design, composition, narrative, sensory experience, haptics and cognition to urban meteorology and pollution dispersion in a creative dialogue. It further explores the development of a collaborative cross-disciplinary arts and science process, from the initial discussions establishing common threads and emergence of shared concerns, to the exploratory creative experimental processes and addresses the experimental practices and methods of investigation aiming to develop various modes of representation by experimenting with the combination of evocative soundscape, visual imagery and scientific models of data representation to communicate and share insights into the challenges of understanding localised phenomena within a global context. The author’s argue, based on their creative experimental practice and theoretical investigation, that the understanding of complex events and processes requires a unique interaction of the sensory, the aesthetic, the analytical and the rational. Further, that witnessing of complex systems in nature, such as flowing air currents within and above a city or climatic phenomena as formation of clouds i.e. temperature exchanges, can be at once highly evocative and yet illustrative of a process explicable by theory if one has learnt to see or discover the information or ‘data’ within the urban climatic atmosphere(s).