Atmospheres and AtmosphericsIASH Research Theme - from May 2011 |
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Context Two astronauts go into a bar on Mars. They order drinks and find a table. They sit silent and glum for about 15 minutes until finally one turns to the other and says, 'You know the trouble with this place is that there's just no atmosphere'. It's an old joke, but it conveniently highlights two key senses of the word atmosphere: on one hand the gaseous environmental milieu necessary for the support of life; and on the other that impalpable yet immersive quality that cannot be directly apprehended or analyzed but is somehow 'in the air.' The joke operates by conflating (literally 'blowing together') the two meanings, but it is a conflation that is increasingly the reality of our new technically engineered atmospheric envelopes, such as the 'designed air' of contemporary shopping environments, conditioned and scented in order to produce an ambience conducive to sales. More generally, against the background of an atrophying planetary environment, practices of atmospheric modification and design have taken on a new and pressing cultural and political urgency, which suggests that the production and stabilisation of atmospheres will be one of the key areas of future social and economic endeavour, contest and conflict. Atmospheric engineering proposals that involve climate modification on a global scale are increasingly coming to public attention through publications such as the Royal Society's recent report Geo-engineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty. At the same time, atmospheric and climatic technologies are being extended in military research and incorporated in new ways into projected scenarios: thus the Pentagon-produced paper Weather as Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 outlines a future in which battlezone environments can be 'designed' to advantage. Increasingly we find a new attention being paid to atmospherics across different domains of cultural production. Our visual culture - to take one example - has become increasingly cloudy, to judge from the development of such immersive atmospheric installations as Diller + Scofidio's Blur pavilion, Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project, Anthony Gormley's Blind Light, or Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz's Cloud Maker, a device intended to literally vaporize Stalin's gargantuan Palace of Culture building in Warsaw. In all these works a 'thickened', visually opaque medium is produced. Yet it is striking that what they seem to oppose, that is our new visual technologies of scintillating high-definition, appear in their own way to be striving toward an atmospheric - because enveloping and immersive - condition: as the advertising line for high-definition televisions tends to run, 'Don't just watch it, live it!' With this, previous models of spectatorship are complicated as mediation increasingly tends toward something we would have to call 'immediation' (which would be the outcome of the intensification or acceleration of mediation, rather than its disappearance), the high-definition 3-D system pioneered by James Cameron in his film Avatar being only the most recent development. But outside the gallery or cinema as well, atmospheric products proliferate. As atmosphere increasingly becomes a thing that is designed, so it is increasingly subjectivized and enters the commodity market. Now one does not just drink mineral water, but purchases devices to atomize it to form a personal cloud of purity within which to breathe. Before claiming atmosphere as a new object of study, however, one might pause a little, if only to register the inherent difficulty of using the term 'object' in relation to something that characteristically lacks the closure, separation and boundedness that the word implies. We are never, for example, in a situation of simple externality to the atmosphere we breathe: rather we are literally infused by it. Consequently it comes as no surprise that writers' vocabularies become atmospheric when they characterise societies in terms of a collective morale or spirit. Reporting on his visit to Moscow in 1937, Lion Feuchtwanger, figured the difference between east and west in pneumatological form: 'The air which one breathes in the West is stale and foul. In the Western civilisation there is no longer clarity and resolution … One breathes again when one comes … into the invigorating atmosphere of the Soviet Union.' Equally, however, the invasive, interiorizing properties of the gaseous allow it to emerge as a cipher of totalitarianism: the Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés' 'On Tyranny', written around 1951, compares its pernicious effects to that of a leaking gas pipe in a house whose emissions envelope and permeate everything. If atmosphere is the thing within which we are immersed, at the same time it is the saturated medium and support through which all signals, transmissions and communication must pass. Aroma and scent, the visual phenomena of aura, glow or radiance, the babble of Michel Serres' cacographic milieu of background noise -these are matters for atmospheric thinking, as indeed are all emanations. Unsurprisingly, visions, phantoms and hallucinations - each an emanation of sorts - are popularly imagined to take nebular form as coalescences within the atmospheric medium. ('Dead men's souls!', Ruskin thought, as he gazed up at his fearful storm cloud of the nineteenth-century). Typically we are told that ghosts are at first felt - they bring a chill, almost as if they might be localised weather systems - before being seen, vaporously appearing like the spectres of the historic phantasmagoria shows that were projected onto smoke. Description Some scholars, such as Peter Sloterdijk, have argued that cultural theory needs to undergo a meteorological turn in order to respond to our present atmospheric situation. The research theme will explore this idea, taking a broad cross-disciplinary and humanities-based approach to the question of atmospheres and atmospherics in their historic, contemporary, and potential future conditions. We seek, in particular, proposals that mobilise 'atmospheric thinking' in a creative and critical way in order to open up innovative approaches and insights into researchers' areas of study. This might involve new ways of considering artistic media, thinking about background music in cinema, conceptualizing the impalpable in literature, etc. Equally, insofar as the theme identifies a crucial zone of interaction between technology, society and the environment, we hope to receive a number of proposals that address the philosophical, political, and ecological implications of our contemporary 'cultures of atmosphere'. This research theme will run in parallel with an IASH series on the Senses, and we will seek opportunities for interaction and dialogue. Specific areas that might be addressed by applicants include:
Events 27 June 2011: "Air/Flow - an afternoon workshop". Click on the link for further details Further events will be announced shortly
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