Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring)

Artist Amelia Marzec presents Itinerant Signal Institute, a project that uses inexpensive open source hardware to measure air and soil conditions and connect local pollution to wider climate change. She opens with a weather broadcast she made about a decade ago, then sketches the climate background behind the project: methane released by thawing permafrost, flood risk in New York, and concern that public air-quality monitoring is disappearing.

The middle of the talk covers the build and the field work. Marzec describes a small air sensor for methane and CO2, wired to an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi that sends readings to a project website. Soil samples were collected at sites including Governor's Island, Newtown Creek and locations in Berlin and Poznan, then tested for heavy metals with a soil-testing group. Her main practical problem was networking. Each host site had different restrictions, from locked-down university networks to places with no internet, so she has relied on tunnels and manual uploads. Audience members suggested amateur radio APRS and mesh radio as ways to send small readings without depending on a host network.

The talk ends with the public side of the project, including costumed animal mascots and street performances, and with a discussion of keeping records as the work develops. For practitioners, the useful takeaways are the trade-offs of cheap sensing hardware and the difficulty of deploying devices on networks you do not control.