Air: A Field of Intense Materiality
Full paper at:
Air_A-Field-of-Intense-Materiality.
PLAT 11: Soft
This brief essay concerns the title of this paper, first, by presenting one of the agents of the climate change milieu, an agent that is too big but not big enough: the air—the ordinary and extraordinary gas; the ubiquitous, the breathable, the rare yet common outcome of living beings, exhalation of the Chthonic, inhalation of the Olympic—and second, by visiting the work series Airscapes to illustrate a set of techno/scientific experiments with airiforms. Airscapesis a work about representing air's materiality against the dangerous idea of air as void or emptiness. Air as emptiness has driven humanity to the mistakable thought of considering air the unfathomable elsewhere. Instead, the air is with/within us, crosses through us, and requires not only scientific but cultural representation. As Sandra Kaji has put it: "Air containment is a scientific aspiration but possibly not a cultural aspiration.