The term atmosphere goes back to the Greek atmos (vapor, steam) and sphaira (sphere), and refers to the layer of gas that surrounds the earth. The atmosphere of the earth is a subject in many scientific inquiries, such as meteorology, which is concerned with climatic conditions and weather prediction. The later and rather metaphorical use to describe moods and feelings is deeply ingrained today in our language and culture, which is visible in terms such as “political atmosphere,” the “atmosphere of a place,” and so forth.
The range of how we experience an atmosphere in the latter sense is wide, going from an “atmosphere that comes over us” to one that “is not noticeable at all,” (Schmitz, 2014), as Hermann Schmitz remarked in his comprehensive writing about atmospheres. They can add a certain tone or mood to a situation that one can attune to – but in their “coming over us,” which Schmitz speaks about, they also express an agency, an affective quality that never comes into full appearance.
Atmospheres, in this sense, can make present what is sensually experienced and, at the same time, can make present the perceiver in their act of sensing, because they form the background that serves the formation and abstraction of objects, forms, and colors against that background. And at the same time, atmospheres can “come over us” and impose a sudden shift in awareness, thereby stepping from the background to the foreground of our attention. Becoming aware of the processuality that lies in this shift from the background to the foreground tells us again something about perception as being processual itself.
For Gernot Böhme, another famous philosopher of atmospheres, atmospheres mark the in-between of things, of subjects and objects – they neither belong to subjects nor the physical environment alone, which caused him to argue that they become the ontological principle par excellence (Böhme 1993). However, this way of framing atmospheres has been criticized as reductional because it hinges on the dichotomy of subjects and objects. Hermann Schmitz, for example, states that atmospheres are not an in-between of subjects and objects, but rather, subjects and objects are phenomena that emerge from atmospheric flows (Schmitz 1998).
What I want to suggest in line with Schmitz is that subject and object both emerge through the act of sensing. An aesthetics of processes can bring our attention to those phases before a definite subjective perspective or fixed object manifests.
The design prototype Urban Algae Canopy from EcoLogicStudio is an aesthetic example that shows how effects of metabolic processes register in the environment and thereby become sense-able. I will argue further that these effects suggest new relations in and with the environment that we are usually not aware of.
Urban Algae Canopy comes as a tent like structure. Its panels are filled with a liquid that contains algae which metabolized carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors into oxygen. A device provides additional nutrition if sensors in the canopy register more visitors, which also changes the appearance of the liquid. The more visitors of the canopy, the greater the growth of the algae and, accordingly, the more oxygen in the air and shade provided by the algae.
This coupling of bodily presence of visitor and algae through the processes of photosynthesis and breathing leads potentially to awareness on the side of the visitors for the impact their physical presence has on the environment and also on the way later visitors will encounter it. The human subject is thereby connected with its surrounding beyond the present or subject-related perception of time: processes and interdependencies are brought to the foreground that had happened in the past, but that mattered in the present moment as well as the future. Events on temporal and spatial scales usually not accessible for us are in this way transferred into the lived experience of humans.
In Urban Algae Canopy, the atmosphere seems to function as a mediator between the assembled bodies – the algae, humans, as well as digital sensors. In this sense we can say that the atmosphere is located in-between the bodies as it allows to foreground connections between bodies and their effects, while becoming also sense-able in the form of changing light intensity, quality of air, and so on.
Another project makes this double character of atmospheres – the being a medium for perceivable processes and a perceivable process itself – even more explicit. The project consists so far of two prototypes for an installation that I gave the provisional title Affective Atmospheres, which I co-created together with Nima Navab, Thierry Dumont from the Topological Media Lab, Concordia University, and Sha Xin Wei’s Synthesis Center at the Arizona State University.
The two prototypes were composed of an aquarium filled with water that would turn into waves, bubbles, and, finally, clouds. But instead of featuring these different states of the water as events, the prototypes highlighted the material shifts in the aggregate states that led up to them, and allowed us to sensually experience the environmental dependencies that would trigger them. An immersive environment such as Affective Atmospheres offers, thereby, a multimodal experience and playful engagement with phenomena like clouds, which usually remain abstract.
In expanding my research methods in this way and developing my own aesthetic practice, I wanted to explore how engagements with a processual medium can become meaningful if there is no script that would guide the interactions. The goal was to stimulate our imagination through sensuous experience and to see if that impacts our intentional behavior as well.
The lab spaces were open for people to visit and observe as well as play with the clouds. While they could watch the phase-shifts and impacts of the climatic conditioning on the clouds, they would also sense the air flow and temperature shifts with their own body. The boundary between the clouds and their lived body was thus shifted, they shared the same atmospheric milieu, which led, I propose, to new ways of engaging with them. For example, hand movements and gestures that changed the movement and formation of the clouds often seemed to mimic the impacts of air flow and temperature changes.
After observing the impacts of airflow on the cloud formations, people also started to communicate and play together, in order to create for example tornados, or to make the clouds rise in a certain direction.
In sum, I want to suggest that in sharing the atmospheric milieu with the clouds, we learned to evoke new cloud formations with our own bodies, in developing gestures that would mimic the effects of wind and temperature. The impact of airflow or pressure became a signal for a potential relationship. This anticipation of a potential relation connects to Dewey’s understanding of imagination as one part of experience.
For philosopher John Dewey, experience consisted of 3 phases which structure the relation between the experiencing subject and its environment dynamically: these 3 phases are imagination, observation, and reflection. Imagination then is the creative force of meaning-making, it is here that we come to acknowledge possible consequences of our actions. Imagination, in other words, signifies “the capacity to concretely perceive what could be” and can bring to light undisclosed possibilities ”inherent in the situation at hand (Dewey [1934] 1980).
Thus, imagination becomes a foundational source for moral actions and I propose that in Affective Atmospheres we exercised those different phases of experience as they led from unconscious play with the clouds to observations and imaginative form-seeking gestures, and finally to intentional, anticipating actions that would mimic the impacts of air flow and temperature changes on the clouds.