ATMOSPHERIC COMMONS

This text was jointly composed by the AIR group: Hanna Husberg, Agata Marzecova, Liu Xin, Taru Elfving, Nerea Calvillo, Adam Fish & Nicolas Maigret as part of the Field_Notes BioArt Society Residency, Lapland, September 2019. It features a set of cards we conceived and that were designed by disnovation.org

Air is inherently multiple. Mingling and mixing, air carries particulate matter, allergens, pollution, viruses, messages and signals. Connecting bodies, places and things at interscalar levels, air couples humans and other-than-humans to geospace. We constantly have air both inside and outside of us, and yet, the planetary atmosphere is predominantly an imperceptible and inaccessible phenomena. Because of its vastness and invisibility, our knowledge of the atmosphere is contingent on and mediated through techno-scientific apparatus, epistemologies, and infrastructures enmeshed in contingent histories of capitalism and corporate and military expenditures. This poses  a conundrum: how to engage, think with and care about a medium and element which structures our very existence, but which is predominantly imperceptible to human senses? In other words, how can we, without disregarding the conflicted imaginaries and problematic histories of both the atmosphere and the notion of commons, cultivate a speculative commitment to possible atmospheric commons, which promotes an ethics of air-care and aims to maintain liveable and equitable worlds?

Bringing together activists, practitioners and researchers in art, architecture, ecology, anthropology, and racial and gender studies, the Heavens Field_Notes Laboratory provided us with a unique opportunity not to probe these questions in isolation, but instead engage with them through practices of sharing, co-learning, and living together. Each participant contributed by leading an activity. These included film screenings, drone practice, embodied ways of knowing the air through walks, discussions on how to sense the problematics of air in relation to other coordinates of the land/scape, the colonial legacy of our research methodologies, deep sensing and more. In this way, experience, skills, methodologies and different perspectives relating to the construction of atmospheric imaginaries as well as the politics and poetics of noticing air were shared within the group. As an example, visiting the EISCAT radar facility, we attuned to the technological sensing of the upper atmosphere, while deep sensing experiments during the walks gave us the possibility to practice the unlearning of conventional ways of tasting and sensing the immediate environment. Recognising that taking time to share common space and making the effort to make ourselves understood without disregarding our differences can be difficult and demanding, we still maintain it as indispensable if we are not to resign on the idea of the commons and the possibility of common atmospheres. 

Over the week a number of onto-epistemological approaches, frameworks, and methods for collectively working towards atmospheric commons emerged. Inspired by one of the proposed experimental methodologies, which by popularising concepts and stories aims at nourishing imaginaries of societal and political transitions, we decided to create a collection of cards that depict concepts which we found useful or inspiring. With the intention to complexify the narratives and to ground understandings of pockets of air as well as the global atmosphere, the cards are presented as fragments of an imaginative toolkit for fostering fruitful debates, strategies, and practices that can contribute towards an equitable common atmosphere.

ASPIRATION

Aspiration is a desire, a longing, an aim and an ambition. Aspiration is also the act of breathing into — a resuscitation from a state of neither fully suffocated nor fully breathing. Thinking through aspiration is to call into question the self-evidence of air and the figure of the bounded individual body that breathes. The feeling of choking makes palpable the way in which air is materialized through a specific embodied practice of breathing, a practice, or perhaps a capacity, that is far from guaranteed. One thinks here of the unequally distributed capacity to breathe in China’s “choking smog”. The affluent can afford air purifiers and expensive masks to filter air, and can flee smog-hit areas by taking “lung-cleansing vacations” (as many internet users put it), whereas the underprivileged, who struggle to make a living, cannot not breathe in the toxic air. One also hears Eric Garner’s last utterance “I can’t breathe” that asks not simply about the precarity of life, but about how precarity is differentially induced and about whose life and future can be simply choked off, by whom.

The aspiration to more sustainable and livable life needs to be grounded in its relational condition: “breathing in the breath of the other in order to breathe” (Butler 2018). This entails critical engagement with relations of breathing, with how bodily boundaries become differentially materialized through breathing practices that are situated in specific and changing socio-economic and geopolitical contexts.  How do you breathe? Who and what can breathe? Where and when? Thinking through aspiration is an ethical and political practice of relating as atmospheric commons.

ATMOSPHERIC INFRASTRUCTURES

Infrastructures, such as networks of sensors, information panels, apps and other forms of digital access to data, are increasingly becoming cloud-like and imperceptible to human sensing. In this sense they become atmospheric, not only by making atmospheric phenomena perceptible, but also by reinforcing our sense of elementality — an understanding and experience of the earth afforded not merely through longitudes and latitudes, but also through elements, including the atmosphere as a sphere that affords movement, occupation and suspension. But how does that atmospheric condition black-box or limit our access to the processes of atmospheric knowledge production? Infrastructures are also atmospheric in an affective sense — they dynamically structure and organise possibilities of life, social forms and conceptualisations of the world. Therefore, the effective and affective power of infrastructures is produced through the atmospheric aesthetics they embody, and through the material, technoscientific, laborious, gendered, and environmental elements they entangle.

DEEP SMELLING

Through deepening attentiveness to smell, in varying levels of cross-pollination with other senses, the practice aims at situated sensing of atmospheric phenomena and their transformations. These may range from chemical compositions and pollution particles perhaps even to data. Building upon Deep Listening practice by Pauline Oliveros, while inspired also by Deep Mapping by Brett Bloom and Nuno Sacramento, the practice of deep smelling requires a critical acknowledgement of the complex politics of air with its myriad ethical and ecological implications.  Meanwhile it draws attention to the edges of signification, measure and language, at the porous embodied fault lines of contagion made sensible in the acts of smelling.

Experiments in deep smelling may include, for example, as practiced at Field_notes 2019: Embodied berry-feral approaches to foraging one can learn from other animals in the ecosystem inhabited / engaged with; Heightening atmospheric sensibilities by brewing different assemblages out of the encountered elements such as streams of water and plant life; Sharpening sensitivity to what is usually considered intangible such as radio waves by careful noticing, amongst others, of shifting temperatures and multispecies interactions, or dust and decay, in and around technological apparatuses.

WALK THE TOXIC

Air slips our senses and resists to be known. Although we constantly breathe, air and its pollution are usually considered as being “out there”. Something from which we can be protected by filtered interiors, that keeps the unwanted (dust, virus, germs, and so forth) outside. This belief is at the core of the problem, because there always seems to be a solution — larger enclosures, stronger boundaries — and pollution remains untouched and our bodies have lost their capacity of attuning to environmental conditions. At the same time, technological instruments are the only devices that have been legitimised to produce evidence of air pollution. And yet, that limits what we can know.  

Walking the toxic can be a method to keep our bodies “in” the trouble, as feminist activists have claimed, to recognise the devices or systems that produce pollution, as well as the effects and violence that it creates in other bodies – human or not. This “inbodied” condition of the walk also facilitates our bodies to (re)learn to be affected and to sense not only the air or its pollution, but also contagion amongst the walkers, as a form of transmission by in/direct contact, spreading an idea of practice.

Walking the toxic is also a way of thinking about nature and understanding the scale of toxicity. As recent studies have demonstrated, even in the most remote corners of the planet air carries microplastics and other pollutants. There is no pristine nature. Although pollution and its effects are based in an inequality and not evenly distributed, we live in a toxic planet. So any walk is a walk through the toxic, of course, with varying intensities and affecting different bodies differently.

BROKEN WORLD THINKING

We can see from the air that everything is falling, falling apart, crashing. The flying things — balloons, drones, satellites — we use to make this sense are also failing. Drones crash into everything: oceans, lakes, glaciers, trees, cars, people, buildings, temples, birds, chimpanzees, mountains, windows, boutiques, power poles, trains, boats, canyons, hot air balloons, bridges, prisons, oil refineries, oil pipelines, nuclear power plants, airplanes, helicopters, agricultural fields, stadiums, bicycles, bullets fired from police officers, the White House lawn, Seattle Space Needle, and the Japanese Prime Minister’s residence (Dedrone 2019).

It is not only drones that crash. Seventy-five percent of the earth and 66% of the sea are severely degraded by human activity; this is threatening 1 million species with extinction (Diaz et al. 2019). Sixty-percent of wildlife has disappeared over the past 30 years (World Wildlife Fund 2018). 

Drones provide a means of sensing the earth; witnessing these human impacts, diminishing habitats, and disappearing wild animals. And yet, even when the drone is crashing or has crashed it remains an important object through which to understand the emergent relationship between humans, technologies, and species. We need to better understand relationship through the event of the crashing drone, exploiting a material link shared by crashing drones and collapsing species. This is “broken world thinking,” an ethos that invites us to consider how repair and care governs inter-species co-dependencies. 

In the crash’s aftermath, we must ‘consider what might be salvaged from the wreckage’ (Redrobe, 2010, p. 22). The ‘world-disclosing properties of breakdown’ (Jackson, 2014, p. 230) bring focus away from invention, innovation, and novelty and to the forces of refuse, recycling, and repair. As entropy — the eventual demise of hot and complex formations to cool and simple forms — and the contingencies of atmospheric exploitation erode stability, an ethical role emerges for maintenance. ‘[B]roken world thinking’ (Jackson, 2014, p. 221) provides an ethical framework for approaching the crash’s aftermath. Science and technology scholar Steven Jackson’s ‘ethics of repair’ asks us to commit to care for a world falling apart (2014, p. 232). The crashed drone and the near-extinct species — this is what remains for reworlding through multispecies care. 

The atmospheric author-artists in action.

Link to additional image documentation of experimentations.

References

Bloom., B. & Sacramento, N. (2017) Deep Mapping. Auburn (IN): Breakdown Break Down Press.

Butler, J.  (2018). “Solidarity/Susceptibility.” In Social Text 137, vol 36 (4).

Dedrone (2019). Worldwide Drone Incidents. Retrieved from https://www.dedrone.com/resources/incidents/all

Diaz, S., J. Settele, E. Brondizio. (2019). Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Retrieved from https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_unedited_advance_for_posting_htn.pdf

Jackson, S. (2014). Rethinking Repair, in T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, and K. Foot, eds. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. 

Oliveros. P. (1988). Deep Listening: A Bridge To Collaboration. Archived:https://web.archive.org/web/20090530145802/http://paulineoliveros.us/site/node/47 

Redrobe, K. (2010). Crash: Cinema and Politics of Speed and Stasis, Durham: Duke University Press.  

World Wildlife Fund. (2018). Living planet report 2018: Aiming higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds). Gland, Switzerland: WWF.

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

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Lately, when I have the pleasure of walking in the stacks of a regal, well-stocked, old library, and am in a devious mood, I imagine I am an alien roaming the halls of some temple of speciesism. I roll my eyes and mutter, “wow, another book by a human about a human’s perspective on something.” My alien observation describes all of human art, invention, science, and literature. More humans talking about humans and human’s views on other. Trapped in all-too-human languages, sensual orientations, corporeal habits, graphic representations, and data visualizations–can we expect to do more, to ever transcend anthropocentrism?

I’ve been provoked to write about the relationship between networks and “community empowerment” and “human rights” but my and your community–our kin as Donna Haraway would say–does not stop with our species. Humans are infrastructure for non-human networking. Our bodies are homes for trillions of foreign organisms, and we are locked-in to a dependence with millions of other species. 

The consensus in anthropology, media studies, and STS is that technological others have agency but sometimes remain unconvinced about the rights of sentient others. Do animals have rights to communicate? Do they network? Have infrastructure? Must humans facilitate animal communication by subsidizing insect internets, albatros broadband, coral connectivity? What is our ethical position to these others?

The truth is that animals evolved to communicate via chemical, aquatic, terrestrial, atmospheric, and acoustic bioinfrastructure (Puig de la Bellacasa 2013). Cetaceans use reverberating channels to communicate in the sea, pollen and spiders are carried by the wind to distance continents, soils store and transmit information across terrain. We enact a type of cultural misappropriation on the species level when adopting metaphors for human infrastructure without empirical and materialist understanding of how bioinfrastructures–“webs,” “viruses,” and “rhizomes”–function.

The earth, air, and water has long been both inhibitors and activators of human communication. Smoke, flags, mirrors, horses, and humans carried messages. Telegraph wires crisscrossed countries before darting under the seas, connecting continents. Exploitation of the lower range of the electromagnetic spectrum provided atmospheric radio transmission. Today a race is on by SpaceX and others to network the near earth orbits. Thus a stratigraphically-planned privatization of the communicative capabilities of the elements is underway. 

In 2017, we used atmospheric remote sensors to investigate one such human exploitation of the terrestrial and oceanic realms to create an undersea fibre optical cable, and produced the following 18-minute documentary, Points of Presence:

Animals have bioinfrastructures as humans too use the elements to communicate. Humans also network nature, building deeper into the ecologies and bodies of animals information infrastructures. New technologies–wave sensors bob on the on the sea, solar-powered cell-phones in rain forests listen for illegal logging, and conservation drones fly above the canopy counting orang-utans–fill in the missing, yet-documented spaces. Some call this Program Earth (Gabrys 2016), not the internet of things but the internet of nature (Haggerty and Trottier 2015), and planetary-scale computation (Bratton 2015). A suite of remote sensing and actuator technologies make this possible. I am going to dwell on one atmo-infrastructure for networking nature, the conservation drone.

Conservation Drones as a Sovereign Network

Conservation drones are used to identify endangered coral reefs (Hamylton 2017), orcas (Durban et al. 2015), sea turtles (Schofield et al. 2017), penguins (Ratcliffe et al. 2015), rhinoceros (Mulero-Pázmány et al. 2014), and other threatened species (Wich and Koh 2018). Despite these scientists’ claimed benefits, many are not convinced that networking nature with intelligent drones is ultimately beneficial. Others claim that the “vertical” viewpoint has been democratized by drones with empowering results for activism (Walker 2018). Conservation drones have been theorized as problematic for privacy, data security, the fear they might produce in locals (Sandbrook 2015), and the impacts they have on wildlife (Mulero-Pazmany et al. 2017). But we need to ask if these slight human problems are acceptable costs associated with animal network sovereignty?

Let’s be clear. We live in a time of environmental crisis: 75% of the earth and 66% of the sea is severely degraded, threatening 1 million species with extinction (Diaz et al. 2019). By 2050 the ocean ecosystem may collapse (Nagelkerken and Connell 2015). To avert existential disaster, human technological response must occur immediately. However, scholars debate the consequences of creating the computational planet. On the one hand, are scholars who are critical of networking nature. Some argue that this is resulting in “environmentality”–an approach to bureaucratically governing nature (Luke 1995) and the “militarization of conservation” (Duffy et al. 2019). On the other hand, scholars argue that networking nature is necessary for species’ survival: “wildlife has no chance to be conserved and maintained without the helping hand of man” (van den Belt 2007). What becomes of nature in this speculative future?

Today, the orthodoxy in the disciplines of anthropology, media studies, and science and technology studies (STS) is that neither nature nor culture exist independent of each other. These disciplines argue that nature-culture duality is an artifact of an 18th-century humanism that positioned culture and humans as above nature. But now culture and nature are united. We have “naturecultures” (Latimer and Miele 2013), the “humanimal” (Bradoitti 2019), and earlier the “cyborg” (Haraway 1985). Object oriented ontology argues for a “flat ontology” that does not privilege humans. Environmental humanities claims that our “multispecies futures” depend upon non-anthropocentric relationships with other species. Abstractly these theories are correct, humans and other species are interwoven in surprising, complex, and often fatal ways.

In light of this continuing revelation, what is needed are studies that show specifically how instruments, technological practices, social constraints, and species co-create nature-culture interdependencies. This approach will advance our understanding of how and in what manners nature and culture permeate each other. 

Bioinfrastructures function in the absence of human intervention, providing models for truly sustainable media. Networking nature via drones or other elevated, embedded, or miniaturized remote sensors embodies the convergence of nature/culture long articulated by indigenous, feminist, and new materialist scholars. In a world falling apart, the monitoring, management, and ultimately, artificial selection of nature/culture will more deeply fuse nature/culture. But, thankfully, this computationalization of nature will never be complete. Breaks, faults, crashes, collisions, and entropy will create ruptures in any network.

STS scholar Steven Jackson’s “broken world thinking” (2013: 221) provides an apt framework with which to approach the ethics of working on networks of nature and the entanglement of endangered species and uses of drones to stop their extinction. His “ethics of repair” asks us to commit to care for a world falling apart (2013: 232). Imperfect technologies like conservation drones and the damaged environment–this is what remains for our rebuilding. 

Towards understanding the contingencies of infrastructuring nature I produced in 2019 the 45-minute experimental documentary, Crash Theory. It investigates the entanglements of disintegrating ecologies, tumbling drones, and human interventions. It provides a first-person account of drones monitoring erupting volcanoes, palm oil plantations, and coral reefs in Indonesia; marauding elephants in Sri Lanka; starving orcas in the United States; rhinos in the United Kingdom; and internet infrastructure in Iceland. It asks: What is the relationship between life, loss, and survival technologies?

Please view Crash Theory here:

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

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