Eighteenth-Century Atmospheres: Science, Politics, Aesthetics

Social and Cultural Geography

Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics, in T. Griffero/G. Moretti (ed.), Atmosphere/Atmospheres. Testing a new paradigm, Mimesis International, Milan, pp. 75-89, 2018

Open Philosophy, 2019

Atmospheres constitute an ordinary perceptual phenomenon that can become a new experience, as the former are more than the sum of single-sensory perceptual factors. Drawing on the terminological pair ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and its interdependencies, the atmospheric phenomenon can be approached in an essayistic fashion (and by means of applying an aesthetic focus in the broadest sense). In so doing, it becomes clear that the atmosphere serves as a condition for the emergence as well as actualization of special perception. Based on Gernot Böhme’s research and further studies, specific (ontological) determinants are identified and differentiated according to the definitional facets of the ‘and’, the ‘in-between’ and the ‘whereby’ or ‘in what way’. These considerations demonstrate to what extent perception precedes the separation of subject and object in that the atmospheric ‘whereby’ is responsible for creating tuned spaces and situations. Turning to the objects of perception and their concomitant ecstasies as well as to the subject of perception with its reception helps to clarify which components of an atmosphere work in what way. In this context, methods of exploratory involvement and participation (in the Parcours Commenté but even more so in the Aesthetic Fieldwork) gain in importance in order to explore atmospheres from a lifeworld perspective.

Venti journal, 2020

The term “climate change” suggests a departure from the long-established planetary norms of the Holocene into today’s accelerating changes in the atmosphere, land, and oceans. Climate scientists agree that the accumulating carbon-producing activities of some human beings and their technologies have occurred over centuries but have become increasingly rapid and detrimental since the so-called “Great Acceleration,” which began c. 1945 with the testing and use of atomic weapons and a stupefying increase in many other impactful metrics. Second, artists, curators, and art historians have focused increasingly in recent years on changing phenomena in the environment and responses to them, creating noticeably more artworks, exhibitions, and scholarly analyses of the much-discussed crisis of global climate disruption and its increasingly tragic ramifications. How might we bring climate issues into the ambit of art and Art History? Both “ecological art” and “eco art history” embrace a range of practices — contemporary and historical — that investigate the environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships between human and nonhuman animals as well as inanimate materials.

Anthropologica, 2024

The interview touches upon the diversity of traditions (including national ones) of atmospheric research, on the correlation of the concepts of (affective) atmosphere with the concepts of mood (Stimmung) and ambiance, on research methods and ways of conceptualizing atmospheric phenomena by the German phenomenologist, Hermann Schmitz, and the specialist in aesthetics, Gernot Böhme, and, finally, on the prospects of using the methods and approaches under consideration in social sciences. L’entretien aborde la diversité des traditions (y compris nationales) de la recherche atmosphérique, la corrélation des concepts d’atmosphère (affective) avec les concepts d’humeur (Stimmung) et d’ambiance, les méthodes de recherche et les manières de conceptualiser les phénomènes atmosphériques du phénoménologue allemand Hermann Schmitz et du spécialiste de l’esthétique Gernot Böhme, et, enfin, les perspectives d’utilisation des méthodes et des approches considérées dans les sciences sociales.

Procceedings. EAEA14 Edition 2019. Envisioning ambiances: Representing (past, present and future) atmospheres for architecture and the built environment. European Architectural Envisioning Conference. , 2019

Atmospheres have a diffuse, ungraspable nature that makes them problematic to represent. Diverse artistic manifestations have relentlessly tried to grasp air infused with properties. Ether is the concept chosen to test the way the history of atmospheric representation was initiated; a cultural artefact whose representation permeates our present imaginary. Such substance has been the image of sensual assimilation, of psychological life and complex ambient effects. Before ambient was subject to technical representation, images of air within can be called 'a state of animation' opened up the ways of seeing and producing ambiances. Several case studies are analysed as a useful vehicle for atmospheric representation. Two main strategies have been identified. The first one is the representation of chance, ambiguity and openness, the creation of conditions to let atmospheres leave its accidental traces. The second consists in the precise distribution in space of particles or discrete elements whose initial position is irritated by diverse agents. Both are still recognisable in our days.

Through an atmospherological approach, primarily inspired by the Aisthetik (Böhme) and the New Phenomenology (Schmitz), the paper investigates the relationship between atmosphere and lived space, defi nes what kind of perception the atmospheric one is and examines the space we experience in the lifeworld and to which plane geometry turns out to be completely blind. Sketching briefl y the (philosophical) history of lived space (from Heidegger to Schmitz), we assume that atmospheres function as (transmodal) aff ordances that permeate the lived space, i.e. as ecological invites or meanings that are ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things.

Global warming epitomizes a paradox in the relationship between humans and climate. Recognizing the anthropogenic causes of climate change also involves recognizing the immense collective human influence on the earth's life system. The prevailing concept of the climate is, however, one in which human bodies and actions, cultures and societies play no significant role. The current "weather-biased understanding of the atmosphere" (Fleming/Jancovic 2011) has uncoupled climate from human experience and forms of life. Yet climate is omnipresent in the history of cultures and their aesthetic, political and scientific representation -as a condition and product of life, as responsible for and a threat to human existence (Hulme 2017). This themed section aims to retrieve case studies, readings, and theoretical reflections on the relations between cultures and climates. While the representation of climate change is currently being reexamined in fictional and nonfictional writing (Clark 2015, Johns-Putra 2018), we would like to broaden the topic to climate representations beyond climate change. This renewed attention to "human climates," we believe, will illuminate vital dimensions of a crisis not only of climate and climate knowledge but of ecological relationships in general.