Atmospheres:
From Gestural Ecologies to Non-Standard and Planetary Cognition

Instructor: Ed Keller & Carla Leitão Date & Time: Oct 3, 10, 17, 24 14 to 16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: “Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life… it binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism… We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet… We must use man as a constructive ecological force… to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.” -Dune, Herbert

In this Seminar, four invited guests will each speak on their work in the context of atmospheres and planetary cognition, with Keller and Leitão acting as discussants and moderators. The Seminar functions as a survey of a radically expanded concept of envelope – buffer, threshold, strata, layer, medium, shell, background – reaching from the surface of our planet where relations embedded into bodies, ecosystems, landscapes, and river systems extend out to move and travel on currents, through aerial dust and hydrodynamics, global networks of information flow, energy, and capital, onward to the immediate near outer space of planet Earth. We choose this approach to the Atmosphere to generate new paradigms and models for design thinking, better suited to the ever more tightly interlocked yet vaporous stratifications of our planetary situation. Our planet’s atmosphere- its networked material, organic, informational, energetic layers-functions as both a conceptual model and a vast, superimposed circulatory system that links bodies from the smallest scale to the body of the planet at the macroscale. Today, we face the challenge of articulating all design decisions against the pervasive and ubiquitous networks of a new nature. Consider a forest, a tree, a bird, a beetle, a bee, a bacteria. These different scales of species have intricate coexistences and the very particular proportions of their bodies influence the coexistence between each other, up and down the scale. The feedback cycles promoted by these members in their ecosystems are in constant reinvention, spiraling in what only appears to be equilibrium, but is instead a slow frame in a process of co-evolution. We suggest that revolutionary concepts of sustainability and resilience may be found by deliberately interweaving path dependencies and potentials of another nature: positioning culture and technology as aspects of a universal system. The ATMOSPHERES lectures are positioned to explore and catalyze planetary forms of relation, life, computation and cognition leading to a more robust model of the ‘atmospheric’ system we live within, and possibly, a more survivable future.

 

IMAGE: Atmosphere of earth, crew of the International Space Station while space shuttle Atlantis, 2009

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