Atmo-spheres: Lure of space - ecstacy of machine

Becoming-atmosphere: from weather project to metakimospheres

Seminar in the series Ecstatic alchemies - elusive ecologies the 'practice of the wild in art'.

In searching for the incorporeal and its elusive spatiality, the seminar moves into the imaginary of geological time-frame we now face in the post-Anthopocene. Different forms of media staging performance move closer to an aesthetic exploration of atmospheres, climates, fluid weather-worlds and constellations. The theoretical discourse on atmosphere is recent, but multidisciplinary protean: in philosophy (Sloterdijk, Böhme), cultural geography, spatial studies and architecture (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Pallasmaa, Thibaud). Joslin McKinney speaks already of an Atmospheric Turn in “Staging Atmospheres …” (Queen Mary University of London, 8-9 December 2017.) This Lab takes further Johannes Birriger’s syntagm “becoming-atmosphere” revealed in some atmospherically orchestrated installations experienced as shared audible-visceral environments. Min Tanaka reveals an in-corporation of landscape, taken in and overtaking us through his technique, known as “body weather.” The incorporeal presence is a kind of intercourse with weather, an attunement to vital material forces and temperatures.

Finally, some thoughts on the latest of the contemporary forms of ecstatic materialities. Metabody and Metakimosphere of disembodied technologies are concepts launched by Jaime del Val, Reverso, since 2013. Johannes Birringer joins in the forum with his own concept Metakimospheres, a series of immersive installations of kinetic atmospheres built by DAB-Lab (Design and Performance Lab). With their flexible and translucent textile structures, these multisensorial performances “blur the limits of the body and its legibility,” creating an imaginary of the uncanny. The eerie visions ghost-like metabodies evoke Roger Caillois’s “lure of space,” here in permanent state of technological amorphogenesis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0t4jKH3SBI

Suggested readings

Johannes Birringer, “Becoming-atmosphere,” PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 2018, 23·4/5 : pp.158-164; Johannes Birringer, (2017) ‘Metakimospheres’, in Susan Broadhurst and Sara Price (eds) Digital Bodies: Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 27-48; Juhani Pallasmaa, (2014) ‘Space, Place and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience’, in Christian Borch (ed) Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, pp. 18-41.