Obscuring Power, 2023
32:25 min, HD video with sound
Obscuring Power is a short film following community “smoke readers" in Pittsburgh, PA. Smoke readers are concerned residents trained in the EPA’s Method 9 to monitor visual pollution emissions from industrial sites and report violations. Method 9 is a policy for regulating emissions with the human eye. Despite the proliferation of camera recording technology, it is still widely used to regulate visible emissions. Obscuring Power is a slow meditation on vision, certainty, and doubt. It combines footage and soundscapes of Pittsburgh industrial sites with glimpses of community monitoring efforts to consider contemporary compulsory risk and systems of power.
A link to view the full film is available upon request.
This project was supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Further Fund.
Press + Media ↝
↝ Sensing Atmospheric Injustice: Eco-art and the Fight for Clean Air in the Rust Belt, by Benjamin Ogrodnik, Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities, University of Nebraska Press, April 2026
↝ Atmosphere + Auras Asks Hard Questions, Petrichor, September 2025
↝ Carlow University Podcast, August 2024
↝ Carlow Impact Series: Solutions for a More Sustainable World, February 2024
