AuricAtmographies

Auric Atmographies attends to the presence of something intangible, a tenderness, a sensation, an energetic shift that hovers in air and memory.

The website operates as a poetic interface between body, atmosphere, and environmental decay, so that the residues of presence which remain when sight and touch have already withdrawn become perceptible.

The work draws on the language of quantum field theory, in which particles remain entangled across distance and continue to influence one another outside space and time. Read through that framework, presence becomes a matter of connection as much as of location, and atmosphere can be understood as a medium of entanglement, where tenderness and sensation travel across subtle, non-linear fields.

Through biometric sensing, sonification, and psychoacoustic phenomena, the work gives material form to something that language reaches for and misses. What it addresses is the air between us, the trembling attention, the auric echo of what we once felt, and the possibility that particulate pollution gradually erodes our contact with each other.

Air pollution data measured over Ljubljana and biodata gathered there supply the structuring material, acting as a pressure that interferes with clarity and shapes the sound heard on the site. The particulate reading below arrives live from the city as you read. Together these inputs compose a fragile, disembodied signal of tenderness, one that flickers, fails, and returns. The piece opens onto Transition to 8, the project that follows.

Brief concept

The work concerns auric attention, which can be described as a form of tenderness that requires no witness. Such attention tends to appear in sacred spaces and in moments of deep remembering, when the body registers something that the mind has yet to name.

A room feels altered after someone has been crying, since an energetic saturation lingers in it. Something comparable happens in a city after prolonged pollution, where the weight in the air is carried in breath and equally in the way thought and feeling become harder to hold. Understood in this sense, pollution is environmental, perceptual, and emotional at once, because it clouds, occludes, and disorients. Out of that interference it forms atmographies, which are shifting weather-maps of feeling.

Because these atmographies alter our energetic fields, the fields expand, shimmer, drift, and at times fail to cohere. Yet in that failure something intimate becomes audible, and it is this atmosphere that Auric Atmographies works through, by way of data, breath, sonic failure, and the remains of tenderness.

What is happening

The sound arrives decomposed and redistributed around the listener. Eight bandpass filters divide the spectrum at 70, 150, 320, 640, 1250, 2600, 5200, and 9000 Hz, and each band is then assigned its own position in space through a head-related transfer function, the same measured model of head and outer ear that the brain uses to locate a source in a room. Because the eight orbits run at incommensurate rates, the spectrum never reassembles at a single point, and a sound whose partials belong together arrives from eight places at once. What the ear receives is a body that has been taken apart and hung in the air around it.

Below the material sits a difference tone. Two sine oscillators, one in each ear, are tuned a few hertz apart. Each ear receives a steady tone, and the pulsation that appears between them is produced in the auditory brainstem where the two signals are compared. The interval between them descends from roughly ten hertz toward four as the particulate load rises, which carries the tone from an alert band toward a slower one. It is off by default and can be raised from the transport.

Every parameter in the piece is drawn from the same measured value. Live PM2.5 over Ljubljana sets a normalised load between clean and heavy air, and that figure closes a lowpass filter across the whole signal from fourteen kilohertz down toward eight hundred hertz, contracts the radius of the spectral field so the eight bands crowd toward the centre of the head, lowers the beat frequency of the difference tone, flattens the waveform in the background, pulls in the depth at which traces disappear, thickens the particulate layer over the page, and damps the swing of the bell. Clarity, in this work, is a quantity the atmosphere is permitted to take away.

Seventy-four traces of the time-domain signal recede into perspective depth behind this text, one written every fortieth of a second, so the field carries the recent acoustic past of the piece drifting out of reach. Crests are rendered as vapour and the resting line as a faint shade, which means silence appears as a dark horizon and sound lifts out of it. Behind all of it hangs the bell, blurred almost to the threshold of recognition, swinging on a slow period that the pulse loosens and the air damps, as a grief symbol.