Atmospheric Encounters: Visualizing the Invisible

Air is the invisible and indivisible planetary matter that constitutes all life. It is an agent of entanglement and interconnection, operating as a network of enveloped material processes that hold the world together while remaining seemingly indifferent to human endeavors. The air continuously signals and reframes the world in which we live, acting simultaneously to indicate future potentials and describe symptoms of the past. As the most prominent material we encounter every moment of every day, its commonality and invisible nature belies its fundamental role in supporting life on the planet.

Atmosphere, considered as both form and process, is a palimpsest of conditional processes and properties, one that is open-ended, flexible, and adaptable, displaying a self-organizing dynamism. It is defined and shaped by a collection of material processes that reflect dynamic ecological, economic, social, and technological conditions. The resultant dynamic formal composition of these phenomena inherently describes the forces that have shaped them, in which form translates the material registration of force as ‘a network of enveloped material processes’ and a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.

The course will explore diverse atmospheric conditions with tools, techniques, and design methods for making the invisible visible. The project is to design, fabricate, and install an intervention on site that acts as both a digital sensor station able to precisely measure atmospheric change and an analog design intervention capable of registering and signaling change in real time and space of a selected atmospheric quality. The work acts as an ‘interplay between the corporeal and the technological’. The collected digital data is to be translated into a set of drawings/animations that visualize and redefine the space of the site and a collection of images/film of the intervention in space that makes visible the selected atmospheric condition in order to elucidate and reconceptualize the site. The aspiration is to explore the measuring and mapping of the air as matter oscillating between physical, digital, corporeal, and cultural definitions that redefine site as a landscape of living and lived space through atmospheric encounters.

Through the work the class will be asked to address a range of core questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the atmospheric environment? How might this approach challenge and generate new understandings of space and conceptualizations of ‘site’? How might this work reframe a description, and a making of new environments not prioritized as extensions of humans, but rather as new configurations that include, and re-value, non-human agents? How might this generate new forms of engagement in response to issues of climate change? What conceptual shifts might this propagate, and how might this approach shape new forms of design practice?

The course is supported by the Harvard ArtLab. The final review and exhibition will be located at the ArtLab and participate in the ArtLab’s Open House event. Funding from the ArtLab will be available to support the production and exhibition of the projects in the course. Readings, lectures, and discussions will explore historical and contemporary theories, precedents, and installation design. Workshops will explore the making of digital sensors (Arduino), the collection and translation of data, drawing, and animation.