How can site-specific, browser-based AR artwork, co-created with community knowledge users, function as a Knowledge Translation tool for intergenerational health inequity?
“Why am I sick? And what would have to change for me to not have been sick?”
Cape Breton’s steel industry histories have been systematically sanitized, obscuring the documented links between industrial pollution from Sydney Steel and the high rates of intergenerational autoimmune illness in surrounding communities. Official archives tend to tell the story of economic development; unofficial knowledge — held in family stories, in bodies, in the land — tells a different one.
This proposal argues that research-creation, specifically site-specific AR artwork developed in collaboration with community members, can function as a form of Knowledge Translation: making visible the connections between political economy, environmental epigenetics, and embodied health in ways that conventional academic or policy communication cannot.
The project draws on environmental epigenetics — the study of how environmental exposures alter gene expression across generations — alongside political economy of resource extraction and community memory work. The Steel Plant as an institution shaped not only the labour conditions and economic lives of workers but, through pollution, the biology of their children and grandchildren.
Site-specificity is key: the AR experiences are anchored to actual locations in Sydney — the site of the Steel Plant, the coke ovens, the tar ponds, the streets workers walked home. Place becomes the interface through which past and present, body and land, are brought into relation.
Two narrative agents stand at the centre of the AR piece: a toxic dust particle and a dust-laden curtain. Both figures derive from the actual material conditions of life near the Steel Plant — the particulate matter that settled on every surface, worked its way into every home. The curtain references the domestic space into which industrial pollution traveled uninvited; the dust particle figures the microscopic scale at which political decisions about production entered the body.
“The curtain absorbs what the factory produces. The dust particle is the messenger between the political economy and the cell.”