Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, 2023-ongoing

Tracing the disappearance of the sky through data, sound, and urban transformation

Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is a long-term, evolving investigation into the disappearance of the sky in urban environments, and what that loss reveals about the way cities transform over time.

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 Google Street View, 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.

The video below shows York Way, in London, in 2008 (left) and 2024 (right).

What Google Street View has accidentally exposed

Using Google Street View both as a dataset (Tiziana calls this type of data ‘found data’) and measurement tool, Alocci began collecting and comparing images across time. From this, she developed the Vanishing Sky Index—a sequence of values quantifying 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 weight.

A series of depth maps Tiziana has made from the Google Street View captures, 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).

The investigation expanded into sound, translating these numbers and images into an evolving sonic system via a technique called data sonification. Through this process, the disappearance of the sky becomes something that can be heard.

A screenshot from TouchDesigner showing Alocci’s image-to-sound patch, which converts the sky regions in the images into sound.

The research 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. 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 investigation does not aim to produce a final image or definitive outcome. It operates as a continuous process—collecting, measuring, translating: a different way of noticing.

The name of the project—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