Name: 【TED】Emily Parsons-Lord: Art made of the air we breathe (Art made of the air we breathe | Emily Parsons-Lord)
Uploaded: 2017-02-11T07:57:02.000Z
Duration: 10 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Camille Martínez Reviewer: Krystian Aparta

The second conditional

Most people think about either empty space

And then I remember my high school chemistry teacher with really long socks

drawing diagrams of bubbles connected to other bubbles,

and describing how they vibrate and collide in a kind of frantic soup.

But really, we tend not to think about the air that much at all.

when there's some kind of unpleasant sensory intrusion upon it,

like a terrible smell or something visible like smoke or mist.

Our air is immediate, vital and intimate.

It's the combination of the invisible gases that envelop the Earth,

attracted by the Earth's gravitational pull.

I'm interested in the invisibility of the air.

and how we all have an innate understanding of its materiality

All life on Earth changes the air through gas exchange,

Actually, why don't we all right now together take

you enriched a hundred times in carbon dioxide.

So roughly five liters of air per breath, 17 breaths per minute

comes to approximately 45 million liters of air,

Now, that's equivalent to about 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

It's simultaneously as small as our breathing

Maybe it's impossible, and maybe it doesn't matter.

I try to make air, not so much picture it,

but to make it visceral and tactile and haptic.

I try to expand this notion of the aesthetic, how things look,

so that it can include things like how it feels on your skin

and how your voice sounds as it passes through it.

I explore the weight, density and smell, but most importantly,

I think a lot about the stories we attach to different kinds of air.

It's called "Different Kinds of Air: A Plant's Diary,"

where I was recreating the air from different eras in Earth's evolution,

and inviting the audience to come in and breathe them with me.

And it's really surprising, so drastically different.

but atmospheric scientists will look for traces

and they'll extrapolate that information and aggregate it,

such that they can pretty much form a recipe

Then I come in as the artist and take that recipe

and recreate it using the component gases.

I was particularly interested in moments of time

that are examples of life changing the air,

but also the air that can influence how life will evolve,

It's from about 300 to 350 million years ago.

It's an era known as the time of the giants.

So for the first time in the history of life,

That's the hard stuff that trees are made of.

So trees effectively invent their own trunks at this time,

and they get really big, bigger and bigger,

releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen,

such that the oxygen levels are about twice as high

And this rich air supports massive insects --

huge spiders and dragonflies with a wingspan of about 65 centimeters.

To breathe, this air is really clean and really fresh.

but it does give your body a really subtle kind of boost of energy.

It's a really short time period, geologically speaking,

This is the greatest extinction event in Earth's history,

even bigger than when the dinosaurs died out.

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【TED】Emily Parsons-Lord: Art made of the air we breathe (Art made of the air we breathe | Emily Parsons-Lord)

literally

simultaneously

vital

intimate