Sydney Science Festival 2023: Atmospheric Memory

Inspired by computing pioneer Charles Babbage’s proposal that the air is a ‘vast library’ storing every word ever spoken, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s breathtaking immersive art environment invites audiences to celebrate the turbulence and tumult of the atmosphere: invisible but precious, filled with voices and history.

This exhilarating show features historical artifacts mixed with cutting-edge technologies from AI, robotics, endoscopy and fluid-dynamics to nanotechnology, mapping and 3D-printing.

In Atmospheric Memory you can touch the world's first 3D-printed speech bubble, see your voice travel in a ripple tank, walk through clouds of text written in mid-air, hear 3,000 speakers each with its own field recording, and interact with virtual environments in a colossal 360-degree projection chamber.

What is the atmosphere trying to tell us?