Breathing Room:
Through art, Greg Niemeyer explores air, environment and interdependency

Walking up the stairs to enter the interactive art installation "Oxygen Flute", one can hear muted chirps and clicks and the occasional flute blast. Inside the plastic-sheathed chamber, it seems as if the music is coming from the grove of bamboo trees planted on the floor. Standing on a gangplank surrounded by bamboo, the visitor notices the heat and humidity. Slowly the sounds begin to change. Flute tones come in higher pitches, then suddenly wail and screech. The bamboo seems to be singing.

Step inside "Oxygen Flute" for a breath of fresh air (photo Steve McConnell, UC Berkeley Public Affairs)

That's exactly what UC Berkeley professor of art, technology and culture Greg Niemeyer intended when he designed "Oxygen Flute" with artistic collaborator Chris Chafe. The chamber is essentially a steel-framed pod enclosed in plastic sheeting. Partially hidden speakers play an evolving soundtrack designed to adapt to changes in the chamber's carbon dioxide levels.

For several weeks, "Oxygen Flute" has been on display outside the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the UC Berkeley campus.

A sensor measures carbon dioxide and informs a computer processor, which adjusts the music in real time as the visitor's breathing adds more carbon dioxide to this mini-ecosystem. The longer the visitor remains in the chamber, the more variable the music becomes. Call it experiential art, if you will. For Niemeyer, it's about changing people's perceptions.

"What we don't deal with enough is the relationship between our bodies and our environment," Niemeyer says. "The air we breathe is a surplus product of 200 million years of plan production. Without those 200 million years of plant production, we simply wouldn't exist."

Niemeyer says he and Chafe were inspired by the death of 58 Chinese immigrants, who suffocated inside a cargo container full of tomatoes in an attempt to smuggle themselves into England. The artists expanded on this theme, with the idea that our planet is like one large cargo container, with a finite supply of air for us to breathe, basically on loan from oxygen-producing plants.

"We're living on this borrowed time," Niemeyer says. "We misperceive our dependence on the environment and we behave as if there were another planet to go to, another race to be won, but there isn't."

Greg Niemeyer inside "Oxygen Flute"(photo Steve McConnell)

"Oxygen Flute" is one of several projects Niemeyer is exploring that have to do with air and the environment, both natural and human-built. Through his art, Niemeyer hopes to change perceptions of the world around us, and perhaps, to change how people see that world.

"Art is to culture what evolution is to biology, what biodiversity is to biology," he says. "It's the source of the fiercest generation of alternatives. Some of them fail; most of them fail. But some of them really help us."

If "Oxygen Flute" takes an abstract stab at affecting human behavior, Niemeyer's "Responsive Door" is entirely practical. The premise is quite simple: a tiny window screen mounted on a door allows one to find out whether the air quality is better inside or outside a room or building.

Sensors monitor oxygen levels inside and outside the building, sending these readings to the transparent screen mounted on the door. The screen displays these air quality measurements in real-time increments, as well as in per minute, hour, day and year. Users gain the ability to modify their own environment in order to breathe better.

"Maybe one day you should stay inside because the air quality is so bad," Niemeyer says. "And maybe one day you come home and realize that you should air out your house because it's stuffy inside."

"Responsive Door" is both a creative endeavor as well as an idea with potential to be a product. "The process always is hopefully, to start playing and then you find something useful," he says.

Niemeyer has been encouraged to patent the idea as product that could be useful in the office environment -- where productivity falters when the oxygen content is too low. "If my goals of enhancing human perception meets entrepreneurial agendas, that's good," he says. "It's very hard to use this technology for anything other than to say that air is important and we're polluting it. And we shouldn't be."

Niemeyer's newest endeavor takes a novel riff on air and environment, but in entirely new directions. In another collaboration, Niemeyer and Chris Chafe have developed their own highly evolved humans.

In the 30-minute computer-generated film entitled "the Visit" (due for completion in October of 2003), humans have evolved into beings that consist of only lungs and vocals chords. "These things walk around and talk and breathe," Niemeyer says.

No skin and bones: these highly evolved humans are just lungs and vocal chords

What's unusual about how these creatures have been created is that their movements are tied into their vocalizations by the software Niemeyer and Chafe have created. On one hand, the body's activity can create the sounds that emanate from the voice box. Running the software backwards, in a sense, the artists can similarly "drive" the body by playing the proper soundtrack for their vocal chords.

"We blow virtual air through virtual objects," Niemeyer says.

Despite his forward-reaching techniques, Niemeyer says his art isn't necessarily different from any other.

"I'm not sure that just because I use technology I'm on any sort of forefront," he says. "A painter could be just as much on the forefront of culture."

In fact, sometimes the technology gets in the way of conveying the message of his art. While tech-heavy art can engender resentment from traditional artists, it can also fall flat for audiences who sometimes can't see the meaning beyond the medium. "It always takes an extra step or an extra conversation to make that clear," he says.

Ultimately, Niemeyer still has to apply age-old determination to his 21st century medium.

"In sculpture, you often talk about the rock having a certain strength and resistance," he says. That resistance and friction is crucial to the creative process and to understanding the struggle of making art.

"The same is true of technology," Niemeyer says. "The tools we use are often unstable and designed for something else. We appropriate them and bend them and twist them until they do what we want them to do. That's where I find the most resistance right now, so that's where I go." -- Todd Dayton