The VANISHING SKY, 2023-ongoing
Tracing the disappearance of the sky through data, sound, and urban transformation
The Vanishing Sky is a long-term, evolving research into the disappearance of the sky in urban environments, and what that loss reveals about the way cities transform over time. It’s part of the research project Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, which includes also DATASONICA.
The project began from a simple observation Alocci made during the COVID-19 lockdown. While virtually returning to the familiar streets of her hometown through online map platforms, she noted the skyline had changed. Buildings had grown taller, denser, and the horizon had shifted, starting to disappear. Instead of focusing on the matter added to the landscape (the buildings), she focused on what had been reduced, almost imperceptibly: the sky.
Looking at historical images, Alocci began to notice a prominent reduction in the visible sky overtime. From this observation, she started to create a personal photographic documentation of Hackney Wick, East London, by taking photographs on the streets every month or so. From these study, she developed the Vanishing Sky Index—a measure to quantify the amount of visible sky across different urban locations and timeframes.
While measuring absence was possible, it proved to be insufficient as the data described the loss, but did not carry its emotional weight.
A series of depth maps Tiziana, where the white areas show regions far from the camera (sky) and the black areas show regions close to the viewer (buildings, pavements, street furniture). Although these images have not been used for the sonification, they have been useful to understand the changes in the skyline by removing distractions.
The investigation then expanded into sound, translating Tiziana’s photographs into an evolving sonic system via a custom image sonification tool she developed. Through this process, the tool ‘read’ the area occupied by the sky and converts the pixel density into a sound. In this way, the disappearance of the sky becomes something that can be heard.
A screenshot from TouchDesigner showing the first attempt Alocci made in coding the image-to-sound patch, which converts the sky regions in the images into sound. The image showed has been used only for testing purposed.
The research initially, focused particularly on areas tied to music and nightlife—spaces where cultural identity is often reshaped through processes of urban development and gentrification. Then the investigation has spread across different areas of London, from Stratford to King’s Cross and the West End, finding its final destination in Hackney Wick, East London. Here, the loss of the sky becomes a proxy for spatial reduction and for the transformation of communities, behaviours, and collective memory.
It’s important to notice that this research does not aim to produce a final artwork or definitive outcome. It operates as a continuous process—collecting, measuring, translating: a different way of noticing.
The name of the main research—Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost— comes from the alert message from the Nintendo console, when the player is about to leave the game without saving it. The role of the title is to sound like an alert. Because what is not recorded risks becoming invisible. And what becomes invisible is often lost forever.
The alert message from the Nintendo console. Image shared for research purposes.
