Air as Matter: Atmospheric Encounters

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 re-frames 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 all life around the globe. Consequently, and quite remarkably, it is most often the recipient of undue indifference. The attitude of disregard is compounded by its behavior as a complex system that displays contradictory interactions of dependency and competition between its constituent elements and its environment, in which the outcomes of its actions are received as inputs for further animation. Nonlinear tendencies characterized by spontaneous order, emergence, and a capacity to adapt augment the capacity for air to resist conventional forms of measure and evade typical cultural codes of definition.
Digital Air claims air as matter by re-conceptualizing it as a material that is both corporeal and technological. In resisting conventional forms of definition and representation, air as matter invites the potential of emergence and production to augment our static realities. This material dialectic changes how we perceive and understand the scope of landscape architecture and how we might compose the architecture of our cities and landscapes in which air is identified as a principal agent for design.
Craig Douglas
Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture