Earth Beatz - Space Apps Challenge

Earth Beatz| The Art of It All

The Art of It All

What have you learned about yourself or the world as a result of living through the COVID-19 pandemic? Your challenge is to express your experience of living through this historic time through a work of art.

The Silent Beat

Summary

This dance piece is inspired by the rapid changes that the lockdown from the COVID-19 Pandemic have had on the air quality in Western Europe observed by ESA's Copernicus Satellites. Sentinel 5-P of the Copernicus Programme has been "taking the pulse of our planet", demonstrating how just in 2 months, NO2 has rapidly decreased. We have attempted to express the change that was brought to our daily lives, breathing cleaner air and hearing the sound of nature around us in exchange of the usual hustle and bustle of city life, leading to a sense of gratitude for and re-connectedness with nature.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Sentinel 5-P of the Copernicus Programme observed 50% decrease in NO2 since the lockdown began in March 2020. As Dr. Josef Aschbacher stated, “it’s very important that we use this momentum to do things differently moving forward and how this situation where we see clearer skies and hear the birds outside of our windows has helped us realise the importance of preserving our planet and nature.” We must step aside much more than we have in the past for nature to rejuvenate and for the air to recover from the toxins we emit. This directly ties into the planet's preservation and continuation of life on earth, as all living, breathing things on our planet share a symbiotic relationship with one another.

We took the NO2 data from Sentinel 5-P and translated that into a dance piece that expresses the effect NO2 has on us in our daily lives and how the lack of it increased our ability to take a deep breath and be closer to nature and appreciate it more than before.

How We Developed This Project

Our team is comprised of a dancer and a wildlife conservationist and as we are both passionate about sustainability, we wanted to create a project that translated the data from NASA and ESA into a dance piece so that we essentially “dance” the change we felt in our surrounding natural environment, particularly the air quality in London following the lockdown in the UK.

We began by searching for data that backed up our assumption that the air quality had drastically improved in just 2 months. We found useful data on ESA and NASA’s Earth Data that described in detail the change in air quality across Europe, supplemented by COVID-19 data from Tableau and Microsoft.

The problem we faced as a team was expressing all that we wanted to in just 30 seconds. In that time we needed to tell a story: beginning with our normal busy life, the sudden breakout of the pandemic, seeing the pandemic spreading rapidly, living under lockdown and feeling frustrated, realising the air feels cleaner when we take a deep breathe, re-establishing a sense of gratitude towards the air we breathe and how we are dependent on nature, feeling more serene than before with a stronger tie to nature, and finally looking up to the moon (our future and beyond). We’ve never developed a dance piece from conceptualisation, brain storming, scientific data collection (this step was brand new to us!) to translating the data and our experiences into movements in 48 hours. We feel we achieved this in very good time and the new experiences of working with this data was very inspiring.