Breathing says something about the present, and decrypting its message requires grappling with a saturated signifier often mistaken for an empty one. So suggest the contributors to this issue of Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics. The myth of universal, ahistorical, nondescript respiration (everyone breathes, everyone has always breathed, breathing is something that happens while we do things worthier of our attention) has run its course. In its stead, contributors advocate something of a new pragmatism, approaching breath as an index of the here and now, a palimpsest of subjective experiences, epidemiological data, and geopolitical transformations. One scholar, Lauren Peterson, recounts the processes, such as industrialization and urbanization, that have shaped this here and now. Peterson reads Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), set in late-1830s Manchester, as a record of the energy transition from water to steam power within the textile industry — a transition that would soon be recognized as the main cause for the residents’ damaged lungs. Exceptions like Peterson’s essay notwithstanding, the focus of this issue is hyper contemporary. Across the following pages, two events are repeatedly invoked to stress the urgency of giving the inhale and exhale our full attention: the spectacles of racist, specifically antiblack, asphyxiation orchestrated by police; and the COVID-19 pandemic, tied to a virus, SARS-CoV-2, both transmitted and symptomatized by respiration.

If we are to talk about the catastrophes, whether mundane or exceptional, that define the twenty-first century, and if we are to do so without the benefit of hindsight, breathing is a good place to start. I’m honored to have been asked by the editors of Venti to get us started by composing a prelude to the journal’s fourth issue, “Inhale/Exhale.” Ironically, I’m in postscript mode, having just completed a book, Breathing Aesthetics, that surveys five decades of tactics and strategies developed by primarily minoritarian writers and artists for navigating the uneven precarities exacerbated by air’s increased pollution, weaponization, and monetization. When the following contributions landed in my inbox, fifteen months into online teaching, online meetings, online everything, I worried: Would I be able to meet the texts and artworks on their own terms, without confining them to frameworks, mine, that felt safe and familiar? I struggle to evaluate my success, for we aren’t the best judges of our own paranoia. I can however say with conviction that the contributions clarified for me why we attach to breath as an object of study, what we want from it. To work through this question, I submit three key terms: mediation, immediacy, and in media res. The remarks below are neither comprehensive nor taxonomical. At their most ambitious, they guide a reflection on critical and creative investments in respiration as well as provide some heuristics (humble observations, indefensible aphorisms) for encountering the works aggregated by the editors.

Mediation

It would be difficult to identify an exemplar of mediation better than breathing. As they inhale and exhale, bodies interface with milieux. The process is an exchange, a transaction through which lungs and atmospheres acquire new content. Yet the ways breathing makes itself seen, heard, and felt, as Marc Higgins and Anaïs Tondeur imply, are inadequate to the complexity of this mediation. Practices of visualization, which is to say aesthetic mediation, become necessary to grant legibility to a stubbornly fluid and transparent phenomenon. In an artistic and scientific protocol, Tondeur launched a weather balloon equipped with a filter that traps particles of carbon black, an air-polluting particle formed when fuels are not completely burned. Let us note the absurdity of the substance’s name — carbon black — in a context where Black populations are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. At a lab, physicists released the toxin trapped by Tondeur, immersing it in an ion bath to transform it into ink. Higgins and Tondeur call the resulting artworks “portraits of the sky.” Beyond their aesthetic quality, the portraits owe their appeal to the shock they trigger. Each portrait is an address to breathers: Here is evidence of just how polluted is the air you breathe. It is undeniable evidence, clear as ink on paper.

The artists Rose Shuckburgh and Susumu Takashima, who too concern themselves with the interplay between respiratory mediation and aesthetic mediation, do not seek to make breathing visible so much as they adopt practices of representation that capture some qualities of breathing. In Shuckburgh’s haunting watercolors, figure and background appear subordinate to a blur or haze. Like photographs out of focus, the paintings draw our eye to the space of relation or mediation between bodies and milieux. Similarly, Takashima’s geometric mixed-media works bring to mind the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s assertion that the best unit for measuring inhalations and exhalations is the line — a line that connects each individual to those who breathe the same air.¹