How does it feel to look at cloud formations from afar, and to then focus on different phase-changes in the material that lead towards the formation of a cloud? How does it feel to be immersed in the mist, to sense the impacts of temperature change or air flow on the clouds and create such impacts with our own bodies?
Affective Atmospheres presented a milieu in which atmospheric processes expressed a sense of their own becoming and, at the same time, their openness to be affected. My study in this chapter considers four particular engagements with the clouds in the aesthetic milieu that I observed during the two workshops. The fact that I simultaneously took on the roles of both observer and participant in the aesthetic milieu is reflected in the following by making the respective roles in the described engagements explicit.
Engagement #1: Sensing Pressure
The fans that were placed in the corners of the aquarium were able to produce a vortex when they were turned on simultaneously. When we held our hands inside the vortex, we felt the air flow and humid air on our skin. The air flow was strong, and the fans gave off a metallic sound when they rotated. What we noticed was the difference in thresholds between the feeling of consciously being affected by the air flow and the affective response to it observable in the cloud movements. When, for example, we changed the direction of the fans, we could see the cloud respond to the change in air flow much faster than we became aware of it sensually through our own skin. This engagement, therefore, tells us, on the one hand, something about the different ways and temporal scales in which phenomena express how they are affected. On the
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other hand, it became apparent how an involvement of different sensual modes leads to a decentralization of visual perception.
Engagement #2: Effects of Gestures and Collective Movement One day, a group of five people came to see the prototype and observed with particular interest the movement of the air flow that made the vapor expand beyond the boundaries of the pool or upwards. In this scenario, the atomizers were working all at once, thus producing a lot of mist. No additional air flow was generated by the fans, but there was a “natural” air flow inside the space, due to air conditioning, opening and closing of doors, and bodies moving.
The group tried to find a collection of movements that would influence the flow of the vapor as a whole in similar ways as the fans did. During this operation, they realized a difference in gesture and needed effort between the attempt to move the mist away from the group and to move it towards themselves, and they also realized a difference between the attempt to make the mist overflow the boundary of the aquarium downwards and to make it rise upwards. During these attempts, the participants were in continuous dialogue about what they were experiencing, exchanging ideas of what to try next. In exploring the behavior of the vapor in the space in relation to pres-sure applied by their hand movements, the elemental dependencies of the clouds could come to the fore. The fact that it takes less effort to move air away than to move it towards oneself has an intuitive logic to it, just as moving the fog horizontally over the pool is easier than moving it upwards. But here, the physical dependencies of material behavior could be physically felt and explored with spontaneous gestures and body movements.
The group observed these dependencies for a while and then developed a range of new movements and gestures. These collectively developed ges-tures intensified the impact of pressure on the vapor, highlighting the pos-sible effects of human behavior on the participants’ immediate atmospheric environment. During this process, they not only copied movements from each other, but also derived possible motions from the observation of the effect the invisible air draft had on the material.
Engagement #3: Thermo-Sensing: The Processuality of Experience The heating plate is at the center of the last two engagements I want to focus on. When I first saw the heating plate pushing the mist upwards, I felt the impulse to reach out my hand and to place it over the heating plate (figure 16). Others seemed to share this impulse. We all stretched out our hands at some point and held it in the vapor above the heating plate. And we all shared a moment of surprise. The air was not hot; in fact, it was not even
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warm. The humidity of the vapor gave us a relatively cold sense of the tem-perature, which only after a while led to the detection of heat through the thermoreceptors in our skin. By then, my own hand had become cold in the cool, humid air. Again, I learned something about how our bodies are affected by conditions that have a different effect on phenomena, which I can perceive in front of me. What we see seems to make us form propositions about how something is, how something feels.
[Figure 16] Affective Atmospheres prototype No. 2, detail: heating plate, hand, 2018 (source:
Nima Navab)
Engagement #4: Mimesis: Learning from Affects
While I was thinking about this, something else happened, which leads me to the fourth engagement I will focus on throughout this chapter. Some people started to develop gestures and hand movements in the vapor next to the heating plate. I began to understand these gestures as attempts to make the vapor move just the way the heat from the plate did. By guiding their hands through the clouds in a rotating and rapid manner, the participants tried to evoke smoke-like structures. Moving their hands or fingers through the vapor in these ways, they seemed to search for the right pressure and angle to repeat an effect they had witnessed in the clouds due to heat. Sometimes they corrected their movement if a first try did not have the expected effect, and sometimes they discovered effects of their movement in the clouds that did not resemble the desired outcome but that seemed to excite them enough to make them keep on exploring the movements.
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