Question One

εἰ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν.

If all things turned to smoke, [only] noses would distinguish them.

                                                        - Heractlitus, Fragment B7

We have Heraclitus’s vision of the world going up in smoke only because Aristotle quotes it in De Sensu, where he is exploring the idea that odor comes from a combination of earth and air (443a25). What Heraclitus himself had in mind is less clear — T.M. Robinson in his commentary lists three possibilities. He is being an ironic monist (“if everything were one big billow, still the small-minded empiricist would insist on telling whiffs apart!”), or making his usual point that things are both plural and unified, or the more pedestrian point that a humble sense can correct a more exalted one. Enter the nose, or noses — the plural can also mean “nostrils,” as many English editions have it, but “nostrils” again, in Greek and Latin, can mean metonymically “nose” (noses = nostrils = nose. You dig?).

What would Heraclitus make of our time? The debate on airborne transmission of the COVID-19 virus resembles, not in a good way, a Presocratic debate on the nature of things (Xenophanes said “the sun comes into being each day from little pieces of fire that collect together”). Mounting evidence that invisibly small aerosolized particles carry the virus is downplayed by the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control, perhaps because it recalls old theories of miasma and malaria, literally, ‘bad air.’ But just what is air, that it can be good and bad — an invisible killer in poor neighborhoods suffused with automobile and factory emissions, or a pristine luxury, like the cans of Perri-air Mel Brooks sniffs in the comedy Spaceballs? It is no element, as the ancients thought, but a medium for life that, like many others, is liable to local conditions and global changes. Whatever it is, it is no metaphysical ether, but an empirical companion for all living things on earth, in life and in death.  Poets know this, from Paul Celan’s dreadful “grave in the air” to Jonathan Richman’s celebration of spring, “when demolishing a building brings the smell of 1890 to the breeze.” Your nose knows it too.

-       Andrei Pop, University of Chicago

(Read more by Andrei Pop)

Some people say not to worry about the air

This short text is an excerpt adapted from the talk delivered at HEAD art and design school in Geneva. The original talk can be accessed online.

For decades, megacities have been defined by their toxic-breathing air pollution; not merely the most often quoted cities by media reports — Beijing, Ankara, Mexico City — but also cities close to the Western home: the by-now-cinematic past-image of smog-filled London is currently replaced by measures of PM2.5 particles, where, according to the World Health Organization, “95% of the capital is exceeding guidelines by at least 50%.” Such particles are too small to be seen or to be cinematic, but they do spark a range of other sorts of technological operations, such as real-time satellite-based maps, that produce images of the air.

Amy Balkin’s The Atmosphere, A Guide (2013−2016) is a poster-essay that addresses air in a contemporary context: from sea level to the exosphere the air and the atmosphere are full of activity; remnants of layered historical periods are read through architectural and chemical ruins that define atmosphere and landscapes.  J.R. Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud, a hybrid print and web-based book, relates to the longer duration of what is up in the sky and how we know about it: sending balloons, drawing images, inventing typologies of clouds and more. Air is full of words, images, engravings, and other media that try to catch up with the dynamic movement both up there and down here.

In other words, there is more in the air and the sky than meets the eye. High up above our heads the air is full of nitrogen, oxygen, light, clouds, wind, pollution, radio waves, airplanes, satellites, signal traffic, dust, birds, and more. Back on the level of the eyes, nostrils, and skin, the air is not necessarily seen, but felt. It is inhaled, entering the body as a haptic environment. It is the haptic environment in which one sees. While there would be metaphysical dimensions to ponder — think of Luce Irigaray’s reminder that philosophers like Martin Heidegger were all too focused on the Earth and forgot about the air — air also lends itself into a pop song.

We could take the Talking Heads’ album Fear of Music (1979) as our lead, some ten years after the Air-Conditioning Show and a few years before Luce Irigaray took on Heidegger.

What is happening to my skin?
Where is that protection that I needed?
Air can hurt you too.
Air can hurt you too.
Some people say not to worry about the air.
Some people never had experience with...

It speaks to a set of concerns that Peter Sloterdijk coined as “atmoterror”: the weaponization of air, from the battle trenches of World War I to the greenhouse gas effect and the recent massive shift in the carbon-oxygen cycle. The flip side of Le Corbusier’s modernist dream of exact air —“send exact air into men’s lungs, at home, at the factory, at the office, at the club and the auditorium” — is the production of bad air. The air that can hurt you is one version of what Rob Nixon coined as the slow violence that doesn’t unfold as a massive explosion that becomes part of the representational arsenal, but as a series of events whose effects accumulate in the long run. As an image it is closer to the conceptual art legacy, but on a scale that functions in planetary dimensions. It is a large-scale image of slow suffocation.

- Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton and Academy of Performing Arts (Prague)

I like this phrase, “up in the air.” It's one of those resonant ones because, of course you know, it means to be undecided, or still up for grabs, or a potential in some way. And it reminds me a bit of the idea of the cloud. The cloud is sort of seemingly “up in the air.” It's a site of potentiality and permanent recomposition and change, and it's sort of unfinished. But of course, the actuality is that the cloud is no longer just “up there,” but also is the very condition of our life through cloud computing. So it's very concretely actually beneath our feet in cables. Similarly, I think the air, of course, is not “up there” but all around us and bearing many, many things. We're more than ever aware of that in terms of the viruses and particulates from pollution. Even if things are not visible, they are clogging the air.

There are also all these waves, and I suppose that is what I’ve been thinking about lately because I’ve been thinking about the older technology of radio and those radio waves bouncing around us. But also, you know, there’s the “Internet of Things,” which again I'm sort of conceptualizing the whole wi-fi thing. So conceptualizing this air that is not a medium in the old sense of something you pass through, but a medium or media of communication, of entities that might circumvent us, that might be talking to each other and ignoring us in a way. Perhaps we are the ones who end up conversely “up in the air” because there are all sorts of communications between devices and between entities and agencies that concern us but don't necessarily direct their inquiries towards us. And we're the ones who are sort of left floating or being out of the loop in some sort of way.

- Esther Leslie, Birkbeck University of London

Transcript from On Air: A Venti Podcast - Listen Now

(Read more by Esther Leslie)