Dust
Medium: Video
Material: Iron wire, biodegradable paper, paper pulp,
GPS locator, wireless transceiver
Size: Variable
Year: 2022
In this piece, I have used biodegradable paper pulp to restore the tiniest, yet most pervasive, particle of dust in the earth and magnify it by a factor of several billion. The street dust was gathered and placed in the two huge dusts I had brought with me. Then the dust was spread out on the sidewalk and allowed to blow around in the breeze. As the paper rolls, the biodegradable pulp crumbles and the dust it collects is released back into the environment. For each of these two massive dusts, I installed a GPS tracker and a sound recorder. With no special effort on their part, they simply float and roll about the city as usual, with the GPS tracking their every move. A sound recorder on one of the balls picks up sounds in its path, while I gave the other ball the ability to generate a sound based on its trajectory. When traveling north, the sound is louder than when traveling south; when traveling east, the sound is higher in pitch than when traveling west; and the sound’s pitch increases with increasing frequency. These are the sounds of these two grains of dust, a combination of the noises picked up by the transducer and the sounds set to follow the path of the dust’s activity. The tiniest, most inconsequential dust—invisible to the human eye but present everywhere else—is given a visual volume and a distinctive sound. In reality, the Earth, human civilization, and humans are in the same predicament as these dusts. From a cosmic perspective, they, too, are tiny. There are others out there, riding the winds of change, but they have tried hard getting their stories told and having their existences validated.