All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapour.

What is an atmosphere? How can we define it as a concept and an aesthetic practice? Is atmosphere the “climate” of a place? Is it, in the largest sense, its “air”? Is it an affect that affects us? These questions arise as we approach the work of Shona Illingworth, who asks us to examine atmosphere and the “character” of site. This is an artist profoundly interested in airspace, landscape, ambiance, affective geographies, and media ecologies. In her creative universe, these sites are thoroughly investigated in moving-image installation art. Never pictured marginally as mere context or background, atmosphere is especially featured as a central object of the work. Foregrounded in different ways, it is always conceived as an actual environment. It is a dynamic space in which temporal and spatial dimensions develop in unison, through interactions of human and nonhuman inhabitants.

Consider Illingworth’s 2015 three-screen video installation Lesions in the Landscape, in which the artist investigates the relationship between the formation of landscape, the construction of temporality, and the loss of memory. What is particularly affecting about this work, from an atmospheric point of view, is how the artist establishes this connection from the very beginning of the projection. We are presented with the mountain peaks of an island, a landscape clouded by fog, and we watch and hear birds flying around up there in the air. This cloudy “air” is a central character of the installation, for it can also be read as the cloudy mental landscape of Claire, the featured character of the work, a woman who suffers from amnesia and struggles to form memories. As her condition is revealed over the course of the work, it is closely aligned with the ambiance of this island. This, we learn, is an atmosphere dense with the faded memory of its disappeared population, and redolent of its traces. The atmosphere of the place and the woman’s mental space then continue to be developed in conjunction, with a series of hazy bird’s-eye views traveling through misty seascapes and clouded skies. These moving atmospheric formations are the external “elemental” matters that link inner landscapes together in the minds of the viewers. We can fully grasp the “air” of the site, its fading mnemonic character, as if with our hands, while exploring it from the air. Finally, the sky of this abandoned island becomes a quiet, ethereal site, even a sanitized airspace, for it, too, devoid of memory, is Claire’s own inner space.

These aerial images that survey the island, exploring the insular site of Claire’s mind, stay with us. They transmigrate and return—displaced, transposed, just as memories would be—in Time Present (2016), a two-screen video installation in which Illingworth continues to investigate ambiance. The ethereal, insular universe reappears now as we follow Claire in her monumental effort to structure her life and maintain her connection to her environment, her past, and her sense of self, in the absence of memories. As the petrified stones of the island appear to turn into objects of her memory, so do the island’s breezy nebular formations and passing waves. At times, in superimposition, Claire even appears to reach out for that windy, misty sky, full of birds flying like fleeting memories, in an effort to touch it. The more these aerial shots of the deserted island mnemonically recur, the more the affect that is “an air” materializes. These medial techniques representing the air end up giving full access to this woman’s subjective landscape as well as to the social landscape of cultural amnesia. As in Lesions in the Landscape, here too, the bird’s-eye views not only survey these two sites in combination but work at mapping a relational landscape. The tangible construction of the aerial positions, and their haptic movements, finally enable the viewer to feel a sense of empathy. Here, we can sense a life, a moving inner life—that is, we can breathe an “air.”

As these moving-image installations demonstrate, Illingworth is an artist who thinks atmospherically. Her work asks us to excavate the very “elemental” meaning of atmosphere, digging up the elements that materially constitute an ambiance. She foregrounds ambient spatiality in a way that also investigates the conceptual construction and interdisciplinary articulation of this space. In the effort to explicate her vision of mapping airspace in such a way, in this essay I will contribute a reflection on the epistemic mode I elsewhere term “atmospheric thinking,” exploring this vital conceptual modality and the different disciplinary histories that subtend it.³ As we delve into the inner workings of atmosphere, through her work, we will touch upon what is profoundly meant by this matter of “air.”

A reflection on etymology can help us define the conceptual space that Illingworth mobilizes and that this text will flesh out. The root of atmosphere is composed of two elements: atmos, meaning vapor, and sphaire, or sphere. This, elementally speaking, is a medium of life. Atmosphere, that is, is the vaporous material base, the condition, the enveloping substance—the “air”—that makes life itself possible. It is a vital, transient milieu that, according to the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, is indeterminate in the sense that it is fluid and mixed.⁴ And, as Illingworth makes clear in her work, this milieu has a medial nature that is not only elemental but also cultural and social.

Atmosphere, a positively vague and cloudy concept, can also be understood, in these social and cultural terms, as an affect or mood. That is to say that atmosphere, as I claimed in a previous study, is the material constituent of an affective geography.⁵ In the words of the philosopher Gernot Böhme, it is “an indeterminate spatially extended quality of feeling.”⁶ As Lesions in the Landscape and Time Present show, this is indeed an ambiance of spatially discharged sentiments or perceptions, resulting from the material assemblage of different organisms and from the intermixing of forces in space. Constituted as a live medium of spatialized affects, memories, and sensations, it provides the very basis for sentient mixture and connection between diverse beings.

In fact, as the “atmospherology” of philosopher Tonino Griffero explains, an atmosphere is always “‘an in-between,’ made possible by the (corporeal but also social and symbolic) co-presence of subject and object.”⁷ Neither a discrete element nor an entity, it is ungraspable in singular or individual form. This is an in-between that is also in balance between presence and absence, the definite and the indefinite. That is to say, to dwell in an atmosphere is to interact with life forms of various kinds, and to be affected by this varied ambiance. To sense an atmosphere is to grasp a volatile feeling in the surrounding space—an “air”—and to perceive a situational mix of living matters that is subject to change. As a microclimate, an atmosphere evolves continually and even dissolves: it is a force field of energies in a constant state of becoming. And in this ambient midst, subjects are corporeally involved in their sentient relation to space. In other words, to experience an atmosphere, as Illingworth shows, one ultimately must be open to and in resonance with the phenomenic character and lived quality of our ever-shifting surroundings.

Atmosphere, then, defines a condition that is fundamentally experiential. To better understand the nature of this experiential environment that is central to the experience itself of Illingworth’s atmospheric installations, it is therefore helpful to trace the historical appearance of this idea of atmosphere, understood as such a surrounding, vital, and fluid ambiance. As we follow the course of the subtle shifts of conceptual meanings that occurred over the course of time and in various fields, a history of the cultural experience of the sense of ambiance that shapes Illingworth’s atmospherics will take form.

The term ambiance, established as a noun, appeared in French dictionaries in 1896. Before the noun, the adjective ambiant was used in mostly scientific contexts to mean “what goes around” in space, having developed from the Latin verb ambire, which defined ambulatory activities as well as the kind of encircling that is proper to an atmospheric embrace. The modern term ambiance was used predominantly in relation to artistic matters, but also in philosophical, sociopolitical, and anthropological discourse, in part as a synonym for the more positivist notion of milieu. But it also came to carry different, multiple inferences and associations, referring, as one critic recaps, “to light, brightness, air, limpidity, mixed with the dynamic sense of a fluid matter enveloping and embracing people and things.”⁸

Milieu maintained more empirical connotations; it developed, as the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem explains, from the mechanics of physics, moved to biology as a behavioral notion, and ended up encompassing sociological implications in defining an anthropological and geographic setting or surrounding.⁹ Ambiance would expand the meaning of milieu, understood as a mid-place, medium, or in-between, as well as its connotation of environment or Umwelt, as developed by Jakob von Uexküll.¹⁰ His Umwelt defines the character of the world surrounding organisms as being subjective as well as objective, with correspondences between the two. Uexküll even sought to expose the more subjective environment that encompasses every living form and being. This expanded notion of surroundings builds on the idea of the existence of an ambient element first formulated by the ancient Greeks and subsequently reprised by modern science to define “what goes around.” Such motility refers, in particular, to the (im)material consistencies of fluids or air, that is, to the space surrounding and encircling living bodies and the bodies of things.

Ambiance, then, develops as a notion of “ambient medium,” as the literary critic Leo Spitzer shows in his seminal text “Milieu and Ambiance,” first published in 1942.¹¹ Spitzer proposes that the link between medium and ambient space goes way back in history to an orbit of relations that, with Lucretius, almost becomes a form of embrace when the Roman philosopher establishes the “caressing” quality of space with respect to surrounding objects.¹² Spitzer, then, via Newton, defines ambiance as a field of forces, connoting the fluid movement of the sensible world. And so it goes that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the connotations of ambiance shift from the biosociological sphere to a realm closer to that of atmosphere, with its affecting elements, or to “climate,” arriving finally to be understood as “an air,” even in the spiritual sense.”¹³

In other words, with modernity, ambiance itself becomes more atmospheric. It does so in the era in which the technical reproducibility of media creates the medium of film, with its particularly “moving” ambiance—the atmosphere of projection. It is at this time that ambiance takes on the character that Illingworth dwells upon in her work—that of a more elemental, ecological, evanescent, and affective technical “medium.” Tracing this atmospheric history of the terms ambient and ambiance in relation to the history of ideas, then, highlights the technological factor that this artist is invested in, for “the history of this word cannot be separated from that of medium = milieu.”¹⁴

As for the term atmosphere as understood in the scientific realm as a medium, it too emerged at a particular historical moment.¹⁵ Combining the ancient Greek words for vapor and sphere, the idea of atmosphere made its appearance in early modernity, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A concept of natural philosophy, it spread rapidly from astronomy and mathematics to multiple areas of research, ranging from meteorology to cosmology, medicine to botany. Discussions arose in various fields about the aerial region—the pneuma or vapor—surrounding the earth, and especially about the composition of the substances that permeate the earth’s surface and extend all the way to the stars, often described as blankets of air, effluvia, exhalations, or emanations. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even climates were widely spoken of as circumfusa, that which sheathes and flows around organisms. A particular conception that is generative for Illingworth thus developed at this point, as atmosphere became articulated as a modality of envelopment, and airspace came to be seen as a medium. The idea was to grasp an ethereal form of circumnavigation that, as Eva Horn puts it, “engulfs and transports the bodies of living beings, be they plants, animals, or human beings, in an ever-moving, ever-changing medium.”¹⁶

As for the sciences proper, these discussions also involved light, an element that Illingworth also creatively deploys when she depicts her enveloping atmospheres and the “air” of a site. As historian Craig Martin recounts in his study of “the invention of atmosphere,” the quality of twilight and the refraction of sunlight was especially investigated.¹⁷ Because luminous refraction requires light to pass through an airy substance, atmosphere was engaged, analyzed, and mathematically measured. Interestingly, it did not emerge as ethereal, nor as pure air, diaphanous or transparent. It was rather assigned, as Illingworth herself does, degrees of limpidity and deemed opaque, turbid, or even gloomy, even in more moody or affective terms.

And, with this material consistency, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the concept of atmosphere changed in scientific circles in even more fluid ways with the advent of the pneumatic experiments of Pierre Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle. The atmosphere of the mathematicians was transformed, with added characteristics not only of weight and gravity but also pliability and fluidity. The nature of vacuity and the possibility of assigning weight to air or its particles created disputes about the borders and extent of the atmosphere, and its capability for expansion, seen as curling in waves. Its density and rarity, qualities employed in its capacity to refract light, suggested a morphing matter of condensed air or gases.

By the rise of modernity, then, the earth was seen to possess an encompassing, layered atmosphere, which surrounded and moved around everything, including flora and fauna, other planets, and everything solid. The concept resulted in the idea of an elastic medium: a blanket, a pliant, “fluid substance made of corpuscles and effluvia.”¹⁸ Thus, comprised of fluid bodies and layers that are not fixed but rather unstable, atmosphere became defined by flux and movement. In such a way, it became more closely connected to ambiance—the space in which we breathe and move.

Moving across the three screens, and immersed in surround sound, we navigate an ethereal space that is dense with complex relational fragments and reciprocal interactions. This atmosphere is live. It is alive with an intermix of physical conditions, neurological networks, flying objects, information technologies, communication techniques, and modes of projection. This air is full of passages and transportation modes, ranging from balloons to airplanes, satellites to rockets, filmed as they “go around.”²¹ It is traversed by all kinds of communicative signals and virtual flights. Here, digital diaspora meets ghostly migration and even spirit communication. In this air, there are transfers of particulate matters, spreading of aerosols, metabolic digestions of nutrients, and transits of dust clouds. Signals are also passed, absorbed, or refracted in this atmospheric world that is never stable. Light particles themselves travel in this sensitive airspace. Sensorially traversed by wireless networks of sensors, this atmosphere is never devoid of interferences. A material space of motion, such aerial topology is full of emotion. Human beings and machines, as well as all kinds of other nonhuman agents, not only actively connect but also intersect through this ethereal yet material topology. A space of mixture and communicative exchange between the very substance of beings, this airy atmosphere is the ultimate medium.

A real form of “atmospheric thinking” thus takes shape in Topologies of Air. The work goes to the heart of this matter because it makes audible as well as visible the invisible vitality and mediatic materiality of an atmosphere. Here, one can even “sound” the medium of air’s inner vibrations. The perceptual auditory mode gives viewers the intimate experience of immersion into an ecosystem of information collection and transfer, a vibrant space of energy transmission and “transport.” In other words, here, we can experience atmosphere as a transitive and hybrid mediatic ecology.

It is important to note the intense sensorial quality of this experiential exploration of atmospheric mediality. While navigating this composite aerial topology, mostly with aerial views, the pure optical and omniscient qualities of this visual technique dissolve, giving way to a haptic sensory approach. Through carefully choreographed haptic cinematic motion, one is able to sense the movement of this mixed medium—the unstable substance and morphing blend that makes up an air. As if actually moving through the resounding medium of air, the viewer tactilely perceives its composite strata and layers, and can even feel the various electromagnetic frequencies that traverse it internally.

As it explores from the air the mediatic power of such transfers of energies, Topologies of Air aims at producing a climate, while questioning its meaning. A lively debate on the state of the atmosphere, and its consequential climatic transformations, is staged on screen. Diverse perspectives from a variety of expertise can be heard, convened from the Airspace Tribunal, an international, innovative public forum that the artist has spearheaded with Nick Grief.²² Working with multiple voices here, as is her practice, Illingworth draws from this interdisciplinary forum to construct a collective discourse and an articulated response to the status of airspace. These voices ask us to reflect on the substances and properties of air as they challenge its proprietary areas. They urge us, from different corners of the world, to consider how airspace, infringed upon, is rapidly changing, and to feel the impact of climate, and climate change, on life on the earth. We are presented with the mapping of a densely enveloping substance to which we need to pay close attention, hold on to, and take care of if we wish to avoid the destruction of our planet and continue to breathe.

What is particularly interesting, in the atmospheric respect, is the feeling of density, opacity, and even murkiness assigned to air. As she gives weight to this matter, Illingworth emphasizes the inner material intensity and internal complexity of this apparently ethereal subject or evanescent sphere. This is not a vision of clean air. It is rather a view of its cloudy, hazy, and even dirty inner workings, for, as we are told, “The future is internal.” With her ecological emphasis on the inner materiality of aerial surfaces, the artist counters as well the idea of the “cleaned out,” purified air that is the effect of surveillance and control. In such a way, she produces a polyphonic vision of climate that is not sanitized.

With Topologies of Air, we thus experience the particular shades of air’s materiality that pertain, in the largest sense, to climate, understood as well as meteorology. At times, the installation’s cinematic rendition of climate, and of its shifting, hazy formations, even appears to swirl around the three screens as if it were itself an atmospheric weather system. This meteorological constituent of atmosphere is not simply formally represented in the installation but becomes generative for the conceptualization of airspace. To better grasp the conceptual range of action of this aspect of “atmospheric thinking” evoked by Illingworth, we thus need to reflect further on the meteorological materiality of air, and take a step back to see how it emerged in history as a material space.

Though it took millions of years for atmosphere to be formed around the earth, embracing us like a blanket, it was not until the nineteenth century that the elements of air became a more specific topological focus of inquiry. This period saw a rapid development in the atmospheric research that is relevant for Illingworth and that formed the meteorological sciences. As literary scholar Steven Connor explains, writing on “the matter of air”: “Around the turn of the twentieth century, the air acquired a new accent.”²³ Most important, for our purposes, is the fact that when it culturally emerged in modern times as a sphere of interest, atmosphere signaled a shift in the concept of spatial corporeality. In his 1813 Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena, Thomas Forster argued that “the effects of atmospheric peculiarities” can be registered “on every organized body.”²⁴ A permeable surface that affects the condition of every being—be it vegetable, animal, or human—this “air” can also function as a medium to connect them. Modern meteorology, as cultural geographer Peter Adey shows, furthered this idea, conceiving atmosphere as “a cycle of interchanges and exchanges of matter and energy.”²⁵ Conceptually envisioned in modern times as such porous space of transits, as Connor puts it, atmospherics became “the sphere in which a new conception of mixed and mutually pervasive bodies was worked out.”²⁶

In essence, the idea of a mixed and pervasive atmospheric corporeality is a modern idea, and so is thinking atmospherically. Such a modern approach to the surface and matter of air is politically important, for it enables us to conceive of overcoming divisions and divides in favor of hybridity, mixture, and interchange. Atmospherics is the sphere in which boundaries between bodies, and distinctions between bodies and matters, human and nonhuman, can be negotiated and crossed. As one imagines the possibility of “mixed and mutually pervasive bodies,” a different conceptual universe becomes possible. Synthetically, then, we can fully recognize that atmosphere, to borrow Connor’s words, “is the ultimate ‘mixed body,’ made up of distribution, communication and interferences,” and that “in betweenness becomes the normative condition of the atmospheric.”²⁷

Understanding atmosphere as such an “air” in this sense, which is conceptually at work in Illingworth’s corpus, also requires broadening our notion of climate beyond the literal meaning. In the words of Emanuele Coccia, climate “is not the collection of the gases that envelop the terrestrial globe. It is the essence of cosmic fluidity”; in other words, it is “the infinite mixture of all things, present, past, and future.”²⁸ It does not simply produce this mixing but is the actual name, definition, and metaphysical structure of a mixture. In the mix of atmospheric encounters of the kind Illingworth strives to produce, topological exchanges become possible. As we can see in both Lesions in the Landscape and Topologies of Air, the medium of ambiance becomes subject, and the subject, in turn, becomes ambient.

Finally, then, this “weathered” form of mixing, proper to atmospheric currents and creative artistic paths, leads to a form of thinking that is not socially divisive. “Atmospheric thinking,” to my mind, is fundamentally a relational modality—a hybrid, “moving” form of interaction that is opposed to the enclosed nature of human individuality and self-sufficiency. The topological exchange in question is diffused in, by, and through all living forms that inhabit the atmosphere. This kind of immersive fluidity, which Illingworth practices in her installations, constitutes a materially relational mode of living. Her version of “atmospheric thinking” ultimately dissolves the idea of a border between the body and air, and dissipates the secure boundaries between the different bodies that dwell in the atmosphere.

This kind of atmospheric mutability that populates her artistic universe incorporates a particular kind of meteorology: an affective climate. It does not simply describe an aggregate state of matter but rather defines the constitution itself of lived space and social milieu. Here, to live in a society is to take part in constructing an atmosphere, in creating “the air” of a place. It also means taking responsibility for this climate: for the air that we breathe in and out, and breathe within. If taken in this relational sense, then, meteorology can become a positive force. Such a form of atmospheric awareness can affirm the social value of porosity and hybrid contact, and assert the power of transitivity, encouraging receptive relationality and reciprocal interaction.

It is also important to emphasize, in this relational sense, that atmosphere developed as a concept in the midst, and as an agent, of a major paradigm shift that ended up recognizing different techniques of porous admixture and hybridity in ambiance and creating technologies of mediality. Ultimately, as such a modern concept, atmosphere can be fully recognized to be itself a site of mediation. In acknowledging this open, processual form of mixed (im)materiality in the formation of ambiance, then, it is important to continue to stress the role of atmosphere as medium. This not only is but also acts as a mediatic sphere. This specific mediatic aspect, as I have shown, is crucial for an artist such as Illingworth, who works with ambiance and atmosphere through the medium of film, and employs not only digital video but also sound as a medium to produce resonant projections of moving images. This is why I wish to finally address the relational genealogy that links “atmospheric thinking” to “the projective imagination,” and end by reflecting on a particular kind of ambiance: the atmosphere of projection.

When atmosphere becomes represented as a mixture or in mixed mediatic form, as I have argued is the case for Illingworth, it brings up the issue of its own conceptualization as a medial space of becoming admixture. In this sense, we should not forget that, as ambiance developed in this mediatic way as a term in modernity, joining the fluid strata of atmospheric research, so did the ambiance of projection. Film, sporting its own mediatic atmosphere, was invented, just as atmosphere itself was, as a modern “cultural technique.”²⁹ Most importantly, the transitive qualities of transmission and relationality we described as belonging to the conceptual milieu of an ambient body are also active elements in the experience of mediums such as film, with its spatial, ambient projection of moving images.

As Illingworth ultimately shows, the projection of moving images is an atmospheric affair. “What goes around” in the art of projection is, precisely, the atmosphere of light and sound passing through air, circling and embracing things and people as they view moving pictures projected onto screen fabrics. Hence, as far as ambiance is concerned, “what goes around” describes not only the medium of diffused and refracted light but also the different forms of sonorous movement that occur on screen surfaces and resonate in the luminiferous ambiance of projection. This tangible environment includes the perambulatory activity of spectatorship, that imaginative going around—the “architectural promenade”—that constitutes filmic viewership, reprised today in the path of mobile reception of moving images in art galleries.³⁰

Ambiance, which at its root is an ambulatory concept, then in turn becomes generative of various other nuanced forms of atmospheric perambulations of the kind Illingworth practices.³¹ It is in this spirit that I insist on connecting the conception of ambiance as fluid energy to the fluid energy expressed in the art of projection, making a theoretically ambulatory move. This transitive gesture that conceives of ambiance as a mediatic passage points to a relation between air and light. It rests on the idea that a light medium is an element moving through air, as sound itself does, with its own capacity for reverberation. The atmosphere of projection is itself such a transitive, energetic ambiance. The ambiance of projection is, indeed, itself a vital matter that is as electrically charged as atmosphere.

Light, in particular, transmits through space an attractive, iridescent, haptic lure as it radiates and irradiates in the atmosphere—“in the air”—of the technical media of projection. This substance can be considered a “vibrant matter,” that is, a component of the “vital materiality” that runs through and across the body of things as well as people.³² What I therefore mean to emphasize here is air (or light) considered not as an element, or entity, as environmental philosophy might have it, but rather as an agent of ambiance—of that active, conductive force that affects perception.³³ Wary of the positing of a primordial existence for elements or claims for their stability, I am interested in environmental substances such as air and light in the way Illingworth presents them, as they shift, mix, and move—that is, because they “go around,” and can embrace people and things.

Since the time of Aristotle, we have come to understand that visual perception depends on media diaphana, or translucent media. In De Anima, the philosopher sheds light on the role played by diaphanous substances such as air, clouds, smoke, water, glass, and crystal in configuring—with their different consistencies and degrees of transparency—the environment in which our sensory experience takes place. Light passing through air is a state of excitation in space that is shared by persons and objects.³⁴ It makes for the ever-changing quality of surfaces as it reflects and transforms all superficial matters, from skin to screens to sites. An energy space per se, it is able to make space energetically shift as well. To recognize this is to acknowledge the force that light moving through air exerts in the world, not only in terms of speed but also in the way in which it can displace objects in its path as well as accrue residues, deposit sediments, and leave mnemonic traces.

Moreover, this is a vibrant substance that not only moves but also morphs and mutates in time, as part of an environment of “temporal” change. As light morphs into darkness with the cycle of the day, it creates a different “air.” This makes us perceive space differently and also perceive different aspects of a space. As things appear in different airs, literally and metaphorically, diverse views can emerge. So, finally, to sense light passing through air as an energy, in life as in the art of projection, is to be tuned to the moving materiality of the energy that surrounds us. As Illingworth knows, it is to be attuned to the many forms of mutability of an atmosphere, vigilant of the subtle changes that occur in the environment, and ready to reflect on how they are not only registered but also transmitted in the visual arts, especially on the surface of screens in the ambiance of projection, which is itself a relational atmosphere.