ENGL 4010: Air and Wind (SP23)

Air
WIND
New Media Writing

These readings engage the necessity of a medium and how
(and why) we (can) become sensitive to it through:
• events and experiences
• technologies and training

At first we feel nothing, we are insensitive, we are
naturalized. And then suddenly we feel not something,
but the absence of something we did not know before
could possibly be lacking. Think of the poor soldiers on
Latour
the front line, deep in their trenches, the 22nd of April
1915 near Ypres. They knew everything about bullets,
shells, rats, death, mud, and fear—but air, they did
not feel air, they just breathed it. And then, from this
ugly, slow-moving, greenish cloud lingering over them,
air is being removed. They begin to suffocate. Air has
entered the list of what could be withdrawn from us. In
the terms of the great German thinker Peter Sloterdijk,
air has been made explicit; air has been reconfigured; it
is now part of an air-conditioning system that makes
our life possible.

Talking heads
[Pre-Chorus]
What is happening to my skin?
Where is that protection that I needed?
[Chorus]
Air can hurt you too
Air can hurt you too
Some people say not to worry about the air
Some people never had experience with
(Air, air, air, air)

Now the gentle hum of the air conditioner
Latour
is heard at all times, and at all scales—
including that of the global warming of
planet Earth itself—even though some
people don’t hear it, remain somehow still
insensitive to it, don’t feel the broken
mechanism, don’t see why some repair crews
should be sent to fix it.

Peterson
Smoke, an early way of understanding air pollution, is a
substance that imbues air; inseparable from it, smoke
pollutes air—it is a pollutant.

Menkman
A visual gradient fills
my viewing plane with
oscillations of the grey
whites and white greys.

Menkman
Sometimes a space is made of invisible rules and viscosities
that keep you from inhabiting it. But maybe these material
properties of space are just qualities I am not trained at. I
have to learn to understand space through properties beyond
my senses, my literacy and my habits.

Loften and Vaughan-lee
It is here that [Gordon Hempton] learned to listen, not just to
the sounds he recorded by his microphone, but to the silence
he now seeks to protect.

[Consider] the sciences and their
Latour
technical apparatus as an
expansion of the sensorium, a set
of elaborated and fascinating ways to
make explicit the fragile envelopes
inside which tiny bubbles of life
sustain their existence.

Menkman
To really read this place, I would need a way to capture and
transcode a vertically thickened geography: a strategy of
counter-mapping that adds layers, stacks, and other vertical
elements to my imaging of this space.

Peterson
Air is produced as space by
sound. Air is sounded. Sound is
aired. The microphone is a sounding
device.

Loften and Vaughan-lee
When we practice listening in this way—wherever we are—
we are able to become more connected to the space around us.
We hear the intricacies of life in every direction […] and we are
left feeling attuned to nature in ways we may not have
experienced before.

It does not mean that we are going to flee
out of “Space Ship Earth,” but that we are
Latour
finally out of this strange idea of a nature
that could remain infinitely distant from the
fragile life-support system that we are
slowly making explicit. Art and nature
have merged, folding into one another
and forming a continuous sensorium.
“Once back to nature?” But a nature, O so
very different.

Peterson
This is a struggle over the skies, fought from the ground.
Imagine, a kite with a 200-foot string. Let out slowly, it goes up,
up, up. It’s nearly out of sight, a speck against the clouds.

Air
WIND
New Media Writing