Permillion.live

Both protest tool and measurement reference, permillion.live centers what may be the most important number of our time: the amount, in parts-per-million, of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere.

The number is taken live from The Keeling Curve, a graph of this accumulation based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory, in Hawaii. Running from 1958 to the present day, it is named after the late scientist Charles David Keeling who started the monitoring program. The number is fetched once per day from Hawaii and being updated on our website Permillion.live . It makes use of PWA (progressive web app) functions that allows us to cache network requests. You need to be online only once. If you turn your phone into airplane mode after your visit, the site will remain functional even if you hit the refresh button. It will refresh the number next time your phone will be online again. There are no cookies or hidden API requests when you visit our page. The dataset is baked into the HTML source code.

For the 2023 edition of FMR - a Festival for Art in Digital Contexts and Public Spaces - we took over a massive billboard that was updated daily throughout the festival. Each evening at 6 p.m., the billboard transformed into a public performance, with fresh digits pasted over the previous day’s numbers.

Credits

The billboard version of permillion.live was developed for FMR festival in Linz, 2023. Thanks to Jakob Dietrich and Thomas Philipp for generous support and curation.