Learn more about Venti

Overview

Venti: Air, Experience, and Aesthetics invokes both the number ‘twenty’ and ‘the winds.’ Conceived in the year 2020, the journal is a forum for discussions centered on the year’s foregrounding of air, its related themes, and historical, interdisciplinary, and critical resonances. Venti asks: how do we become aware of something invisible and of things that are always in the air — such as the air itself? Investigating this query in a series of thematic issues, Venti explores the indexical qualities of air and our awareness of it through effects and affects.

Venti’s inquiries into the field of the atmospheric humanities unfold through a series of multidisciplinary readings on a range of topics: atmosphere, air bubbles, plein air, wind, vessels, and airwaves are but a few of the concepts through which our collective aims to understand the broad and elusive topic of air. Attempting to fulfill the impossible task of grounding air, Venti strives to do so through the unfolding of questions and answers within each particular issue and across all twenty. Containing interdisciplinary investigations and concluding each issue with a thematic definition allows Venti to become not only a collective but also a collection, acknowledging and preserving relevant approaches to understanding the world and its atmosphere today. 

Venti looks to art, criticism, history, philosophy, and literature to ask what it means to be both in the air and a being of the air. For this reason, Venti will provide the following interdisciplinary mediums for discussion: 

• Text — featuring articles and pieces of creative writing (fiction, poetry, translation), anywhere between 1000 and 6000 words

• Image — featuring mixed artistic modes, including work by a featured artist and photo essays

• Audio — featuring one commissioned soundscape, song, or song cycle (5-20 minutes in length) inspired by a particular issue and one podcast session per issue, with 2-3 contributors in conversation