This TED Talk features cross-disciplinary artist Emily Parsons Lord, recorded live at TEDx Youth at Sydney, 2016.

If I asked you to picture the air, what do you imagine?

Most people think about either empty space or clear blue sky

or sometimes trees dancing in the wind.

And then I remember my high school chemistry teacher

with really long socks at the

blackboard, drawing diagrams of sort of bubbles connected to other bubbles and describing how they

vibrate and collide in a kind of frantic soup. But really, we tend not to think about the air that

much at all. We notice it mostly

when there's some kind of unpleasant sensory intrusion upon it,

like a terrible smell or something visible like smoke or mist.

But it's always there.

It's touching all of us right now.

It's even inside us.

Our air is immediate, vital and intimate, and yet it's so easily forgotten.

So what is the air? It's a combination of the invisible gases that enveloped the Earth,

attracted by the Earth's gravitational pool.

And even though I'm a visual artist,

I'm interested in the invisibility of the air.

I'm interested in how we imagine it,

how we experience it, and how we all have an innate understanding of its materiality through breathing. All life on earth changes the air

through gas exchange, and we're all doing it right now.

...