Moss Walk is a research-based, open-source digital project that investigates how mosses—among the most sensitive non-vascular plants—record and reveal urban microclimates. The bio-indicators of mosses have long been used by scientists to assess air quality, calculate the Index of Atmospheric Purity (IAP), and trace pollution conditions around industrial zones.

Growing in cracks, shadows, and neglected corners, these overlooked organisms form a living archive of the city’s atmospheric history.
Designed as a long-term, ongoing participatory initiative, this project will invite residents who live or work in the neighborhoods where the research takes place to document moss occurrences in their everyday surroundings, thereby collectively building a digital artwork—a quasi-spherical topological structure functioning as a boundless ecological container.

This project reimagines these scientific properties not only as technical measurement indicators, but as a collaborative process that invites residents and mosses to jointly construct a multi-layered understanding of trans-species coexistence in a shared urban landscape.

About the project’s approach

Through participatory walks and intuitive digital mapping across local streets, courtyards and common edges, Moss Walk invites contributors to encounter and engage directly with the overlooked groups in our shared cities.

Using custom sensing toolkits to automatically log and recognize the ecological properties of moss groups, along with collective insights from intuitive fieldnotes that document presence, estimated coverage, visible growth conditions and sharing moment, these hybrid factors form the basis of the Moss Microclimate Index (MMI), translating complex environmental parameters and community-interpreted relational affinities into a co-creative digital system.
As an alternative cartography, this quasi-spherical topological network dynamically remaps fragmented moss points into nodes connected through weighted rhizomatic links. It forms an evolving digital organism that merges scientific properties with lived experience to visualize hidden atmospheric proximity, environmental stressors and ecological resilience.

Designed as an open-source system, Moss Walk invites contributors to log in and input their encounters anytime, connecting human lived experience with non-human agencies to reveal how diverse forces shape the urban atmospheric life.

About the talent