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Toxicity. Driven Breathless.
Toxicity. Driven Breathless translates the silent noise of pollution and digital networks into a tangible, aesthetic experience, confronting viewers with the hidden systems we live within. The artwork channels the rhythm of urbanisation into a living, generative composition. The rectilinear forms echo city blocks, road systems, and data grids, yet they are unstable, shifting with the flows of pollution data. The result is an evolving “toxic modernism”—a dynamic grid where the purity of abstraction collides with the messy realities of environmental collapse.
Toxicity. Driven Breathless situates itself within the broader discourse on technology and mass urbanisation. Cities are engines of growth and innovation, but also sites of immense environmental strain. Here, the invisible infrastructures of air quality, carbon emissions, and digital surveillance are revealed as central forces shaping daily life. The artwork acts as a mirror: it shows not only what the city is, but also what it is becoming under the weight of technology-driven expansion.
By turning real-time data into a visual experience, Toxicity. Driven Breathless exposes the feedback loops between humanity, urbanisation, and machine intelligence. Every breath becomes data, every behaviour a signal, every pollutant a mark on the evolving canvas. It is a portrait of the contemporary city: beautiful, overwhelming, and suffused with the toxicity that sustains and endangers it. Toxicity makes visible the often-overlooked infrastructure of environmental damage. It translates the silent noise of pollution and digital networks into a tangible, aesthetic experience, confronting viewers with the hidden systems we live within. The piece explores the monitored city, where every breath, behaviour, and signal is data—mapped, stored, and reflected back through code.
How. Using a custom-built electronic system, it scans real-time pollution data from 120 cities worldwide. An embedded AI, trained through machine learning, interprets these data streams to reveal patterns of toxicity—rendered visually as dense, traffic-like flows.
Exhibition Formats: Either wall based or exhibited on the floor as a pair. There are now two separate panels each size 120 cm by 100 cm. Sometimes I exhibit them together on the floor, in which case it's 120cm by 200cm.
Exhibitions.
Meta.Morf 2026 – Future Manifestos / Trondheim biennale Norway 2026
Living In Tech– Palau Robert Barcelona. Spain. 2025
Deutsches Museum. Nuremberg. Germany. 2023
Heinz Nixdorf Museum. Paderborn. Germany 2023
Museum Of the Future. Enschede. Netherlands 2022
La Filature, Scène Nationale. Mulhouse. France 2021
Jarvenpaa Art Museum. Finland 2021
Museum Of Cryptography. Moscow. Russia 2021
Toxicity on the floor. 100cm by 240 cm. Shown here at Heinz Nixdorf Paderborn. 2024. Toxicity. Driven Breathless is a striking exploration of how pollution, data, and AI converge in our urban landscapes. It invites contemplation of our complicity in these systems and their tangible impact—making visible the unseen and urgent struggles of the contemporary city.
Toxicity. Hung on wall 100 cm by 120cm The artwork questions the reality of how we are polluting our cities and our environment. As we increasingly pollute the air with our behaviors, other systems and networks become evident. This artwork uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a landscape governed by AI. The cities we inhabit disclose our behaviour in these systems.
Shown here in Barcelona at Palau Robert Simbiòpolis: a journey in three stages
1. The Invisible Violence of Urban Life
The artwork reveals pollution—something inhaled constantly yet rarely perceived—as a pervasive, structuring force of contemporary existence. By visualising real-time air quality data from 120 cities, Toxicity. Driven Breathless exposes environmental damage not as an abstract statistic, but as a living, global condition. The title itself suggests a city that both propels us forward (“driven”) and deprives us of breath—progress intertwined with suffocation.
2. The City as a Monitored, Datafied Body
Conceptually, the work positions the city as a cybernetic organism where every breath, movement, and emission becomes data—captured, processed, and fed back through algorithmic systems. Pollution is not only an ecological problem but also a data problem: measured, visualised, and managed through code. The artwork reveals how surveillance, environmental monitoring, and urban governance converge, turning lived experience into streams of information.
3. Toxic Modernism: Abstraction Meets Collapse
Visually, the work draws on the language of modernist abstraction—grids, rectilinear forms, ordered systems—but destabilises it through live data. The shifting, traffic-like flows echo road networks, data grids, and city blocks, yet they are perpetually disrupted by toxicity. This collision produces what might be called a “toxic modernism”: the aesthetic order of progress undermined by the environmental consequences it generates.
Conceptual Position
Toxicity. Driven Breathless sits within a broader critique of technology-driven urbanisation, where innovation and environmental degradation are inseparable. The work does not moralise; instead, it acts as a mirror. By translating pollution and digital networks into a generative visual system, it reveals the feedback loops between humanity, machine intelligence, and the atmosphere itself. Beauty and danger coexist, just as they do in the contemporary city.
Ultimately, the work is a portrait of the present condition: a world where air, bodies, cities, and algorithms are deeply entangled. Every breath becomes data, every pollutant a trace, every city a node in a planetary system of extraction, control, and survival.
(c) Stanza made in 2020 (AKA Steve Tanza)
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