Oriana Persico, an artist and cyber-ecologist scientist, brings pneumOS to Expo 2025 in Osaka. This is an interactive work combining art, science and technology to transform air quality data into a sensory and poetic experience. Part lung, part musical instrument, the installation breathes with the city and the Italian Pavilion, drawing visitors into a new awareness of the most essential common good: air. Consisting of a breathing bag and five sound membranes, it processes in real time measurements from three monitoring stations in Ravenna, translating them into a “Grammar of Breath” that varies from the calm and harmonious breathing of clean air to the acute panting associated with pollution, enriched in Osaka by a ring of LEDs that project illuminated writing in the air. Located in the “IO” section of the Italian Pavilion, designed by MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects, the work is in dialogue with masterpieces such as the Farnese Atlas, Leonardo, Caravaggio and Tintoretto, embodying the theme “Art Regenerates Life” and involving visitors in a co-sensitive experience that transforms them into custodians of urban breathing.
pneumOS represents a radical gesture, a cybernetic organ that breathes with the city, transforming invisible data into a co-sensitive experience. It is not a simple technological installation, but a living creature of light, sound and movement, capable of bringing out a grammar of breath as open data where science meets poetry. pneumOS feeds, records and translates the invisible beat of our contemporary era, the air we breathe, fragile and shared where practice and tactics coexist, nurturing a personal and collective legacy. Visually, pneumOS challenges all categories. The work is exotic, without being esoteric, and festive – a celebration welcoming the ritual of world breathing. Its shapes are reminiscent of forests, membranes, mushrooms and jellyfish fused into an alien ecosystem, a landscape that could belong as much to a hyper-technological future as to a primordial myth. Breath is not just a metaphor, but a concrete mechanism through which the work forms a dynamic relationship with the environment and its viewers, creating cycles of mutual influence that recall co-evolutionary processes among biological species.
The work’s physicality – part lung, part musical instrument – reveals-translates its vocation, namely, to be an empathic machine, an organism that not only measures, but also senses and co-senses/consents. The data on air quality are not just “cold” figures in this instance, but become rhythm, vibration, colour and sound frequency. The clean air “sounds” with clear tones, the polluted one moans with gloomy bass. pneumOS belongs to a new generation of “disembodied organs”; no longer a cyborg in the traditional sense, because it does not fuse flesh and metal, rather an infoborg (a term borrowed from Luciano Floridi), a “data-zoetic” agent that contains within it the life of data, living breaths in their simultaneous becoming poiesis and áisthesis, a sensitive crossroads of common feeling. pneumOS is an entity that lives and reproduces in the epigenetic system of culture. As in biology, where epigenetics transmits information without mutating the DNA, pneumOS disseminates knowledge and practice without the constraints of unique hardware, but of open code. pneumOS is designed to be replicated, modified and transplanted into other urban contexts. All cities can welcome it and give it a unique and unrepeatable breath.
“The anatomy of this alien organ is a robotic respiratory system that simulates a human lung, phonatory membranes that translate data into sound, an LED ring that projects illuminated writing in the air. But true innovation lies in including, within its taxonomy, the “role in the ecosystem”: viewers become an active part and develop sense-ability (sensable) by taking on responsibility for what they breathe with it. They are no longer spectators, but respons-able and empowered custodians of responsibility. The memory of Salvatore Iaconesi can be found within pneumOS, his thought transforming into a continuous beat, a code that breathes pneumatic vibrations, preserving and rehabilitating – within the two large letters OS – the beginning of an open mind (open source) that also records the universal and authentic heart of Oriana-Salvatore. Through its maternal and generative womb pneumOS delivers a “school of knowledge”, dismantling, hacking and rebuilding a living laboratory so that it becomes a common language, in an era of breathing crisis – pollution, climate crisis and pandemics. pneumOS is not only a diagnosis, but also a therapy. If air is a common good, then pneumOS establishes and develops a collective-connective-generative intelligence capable of transforming the quality of the environment into a practice of mutual care. Its breath is physical and metaphorical, pulsating with the city, preserving memories and generating a present that exudes a future performance that has at its core the present participle of r-esisting — resisting and re-existing. This is a new breath for a world-worlds that must learn to breathe differently – and do this together (co-breathing).
preghiera (prayer)
nascosta (hidden)
espira (exhale)
umbratile (shadowed)
mondi (worlds)
Organici (organic)
Spirano (they breathe)
images (all): (cover 1) Oriana Persico,«pneumOS», Expo 2025
