Affective spaces Experiencing atmosphere in the visual arts

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely subjective state nor an objective thing. Atmosphere is essentially a quasi-object pervaded by a specific affective quality and a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our outer life experiences, while mood is a quasi-subject pervaded by specific objective quality and thus a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our inner life experiences. A practical dimension is thereby, from the outset, embedded in the consideration of both concepts. This is mainly characterized by actions and, correspondingly, ethical aspects, which concern the design and creation of atmosphere and thus the triggering of mood through works of art. Here, on the one hand, the process of artistic formation, long neglected in the European tradition, is given prominence as an aesthetic practice, and on the other hand, an interactive dialogue is effectively established between the artist, the work and the viewer. Due to the fact that atmosphere and mood, both as in-between, emphasize the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived from two sides, here the decisive question is: in what kind of environment do we live or participate and in what way do we experience it? The focus of aesthetics is now not on the conventional issue whether the environment is beautiful or gives us a sense of beauty, but on how the environment influences our feeling of being there (Befinden) through our own sensuality. Such an approach would contribute to a critical transformation in aesthetic methodology, namely from the ontological and/or epistemological what to the phenomenological and anthropological how. The tension between atmosphere and mood, as revealed here, opens up a large space for exploring a new understanding of aesthetics. On this basis the special issue pursued to diversify this discussion on an international level. ARTICLES 8 Martina Sauer und Zhuofei Wang – Introduction 11 Zhuofei Wang – An Interview with Gernot Böhme 19 Elisabeth Neumann – Being Scared and Scaring Oneself in Video Games: The “Atmosfearic” Aesthetics of Amnesia: Rebirth 41 Paulo Gajanigo – The Mood for Democracy in Brazil: Controlling the Public Atmosphere During the Transitional Period 1974 – 1985 59 Zhuofei Wang – At Atmosphere and Moodmospheric Experience: Fusion of Corporeality, Spirituality and Culturality 77 Juan Albert and Lin Chen – Working with Atmospheres to Improve our Planet’s Mood 95 Andreas Rauh – Aesthetic Interest and Affectability 107 Katharina Brichetti and Franz Mechsner – Healing Atmospheres: A Design Based Study 127 Giada Lombardi, Martina Sauer, and Giuseppe Di Cesare – An Affective Perception: How “Vitality Forms” Influence our Mood

Social and Cultural Geography

Affective and Pleasurable Design, 2023

In this study we analyse approaches through which the construction of atmospheres in painting is accomplished, and in which ways there might be a crucial relationship between the conception of these images, and the body of sensation. Further to a theoretical framework, we study diverse case studies and propose to establish pertinent distinctions. The cases are examined from the point of view of their pictorial values, and are juxtaposed in sets in order to endeavour to question each other in a more pertinent manner. We try to reach conclusions regarding the construction of atmospheres in themselves, and also in which forms these might allow cognitive and interpretative advances, and how these constructions might be related to different mechanisms of sensation and perception, and in particular how these will be enabled by the body of sensation.

“Seeing oneself sensing”. Atmospheric perception in installation art Installation art is an important form of contemporary art, which flourishes in the ever-expanding field of periodical art festivals as well as in contemporary experience-centered museum spaces. Installations are spatial and usually temporary art works that immerse the viewer in a highly stimulating artificial environment. Olafur Elisson’s well-known “Weather Project” (2003), for instance, consisted of a giant artificial sun-disc, constructed of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps that plunged the monumental entrance hall of Londen’s Tate Modern into a warm yellowish light. The comfortable yet aw-inspiring atmosphere of the work was enhanced by artificial mist banks. Sitting or lying on the floor, the visitors could observe themselves and each other in a huge mirror, fixed to the ceiling of the space – a tribe of ants in a sublime yet hospitable universe. Eliasson likes to refer to his installations as “experience-machines”: constructions made for the purpose of both eliciting experiences and reflecting on what they are like. Foregrounding the experience of the viewer is characteristic of installation art as such, which is often said to have turned passive spectators into engaged participants. This engaged, participative spectatorship is what my paper seeks to analyze. By drawing, among others, on Gernot Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, as well as on Arnold Berleant’s concepts of environment and aesthetic engagement, I will argue that the viewer’s participation sprouts from his or her becoming aware of the installation’s atmosphere, which amounts to the initial experience of the installation as a whole. With regard to installations one cannot take an external viewing position and therefore not gain an overview. Experiencing an installation is an experience of an environment that emphatically involves oneself. As atmospheres constitute an ‘in-between’, between environmental qualities and human sensibilities (Böhme), I will argue that an understanding of atmospheric perception allows us to grasp how ‘environment’ is not external but arises out of our active and perceptual involvement with the world (Berleant). Installation art promotes both atmospheric perception and environmental engagement and can therefore help us to reflect on our position in the world.

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

Proceedings of DARCH 2022 November - 3rd International Conference on Architecture & Design

In this paper we try to understand ways through which the construction of atmospheres in the field of painting is operated. The methodology consisted of a literature review that enabled a choice of case studies that we found appropriate and capable of producing fruitful connections between themselves. We try to establish several distinctions and different approaches to try to clarify different ways in which, in our perspective, diverse types of atmospheres might be constructed. The case studies are chosen for their ability to question each approach, considering their pictorial values rather than questions of historical or other frameworks. We try to reach conclusions concerning the construction of atmospheres in themselves and what they might induce, considering mainly concepts developed by the neurologist Erwin Straus. We were particularly focused on the potential conclusions and possible knowledge concerning the construction of atmospheres in themselves, and what they might induce in cognitive and its consequences in interpretative forms, namely in design in the scope of its operative field.

Literature and Aesthetics, 2013

We are always in atmospheres. Every where has, is an atmosphere. We are always affected by atmosphere, more or less consciously, more or less intensively. A crowded street, an open field, night, a moment of anticipatory tension, a jubilant throng, the aroma of freshly-turned earth on a green hillside in the rain in the sombre stillness of a funeral, a post-coital haze, a boring seminar in a white box-shaped room. However neutral or benign a space is designed to be, however unconsciously or habitually dwelt, it has, it is, atmosphere. If space is anything more than volumetric void, ideal abstraction, or pure potential, it is atmosphere. Certainly, if space, as opposed to place, can be experienced, it is as atmosphere. This article outlines a phenomenological-performative methodology for the apprehension of atmospheres, based in the work of Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme. It examines the concept of atmosphere in detail, and proposes a practical application in a site-specific performance project conducted in urban environments. Ultimately, it claims a role for performance phenomenology as a means of providing a more in-depth, body-centred analysis of the aesthetic experience of being in place than is attainable by other means.

Atmosphere and Aesthetics: A Plural Perspective, 2019

This chapter has two different parts. The editors firstly provide some of the reasons motivating the project of this book, which has been conceived and planned to give an account of the widespread in-terest gained by the ordinary concept of “atmosphere” in the last twenty years. “Atmosphere” has been more and more subsumed by human and social sciences, thereby becoming a technical notion. In this broader context, the editors secondly aim at showing and inquiring the tight relationship between atmosphere and Aesthetics. This discipline is no longer only a theory of art, but has recovered its original vocation: to be a general theory of perception conceived of as an ordinary experience of pre-logical character. In the second part, the editors give a short account of the chapters that compose the book, by which also appears the wide breadth and the scope of applications concerning an atmosphere-based Aesthetics.

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.

Open Philosophy, 2019

Is there really an atmospheric turn? The concept of “atmosphere” as a qualitative-emotional prius of sensory experience seems today to have encouraged the convergence of many interdisciplinary studies focused on the qualitative aspects of our “surroundings”. Based on the neo-phenomenological theory of atmospheric perception as a first pathivc impression and a felt-bodily communication, this paper explores and synthesises the relationship between atmospheres and expressive qualities. It thus clarifies the key features of a general “pathic” aesthetics. It considers perceivers as beings who are touched by atmospheric feelings in emotional and tactile ways. These are widespread and vary in their modulation of lived space. They are also ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things of the lifeworld. By realising how they (especially in an unintentional way) expose themselves to what happens, perceivers turn out not to be “subjects of something” but rather “subjects to something”: that is, human beings who are only “sovereign” when they are free, at least in their daily experience, from the dogma of rational and methodological autonomy imposed by Western Modernity.