Would you live in a floating city in the sky?

Tomas Saraceno: Becoming Aerosolar 21er Haus, Belvedere: Vienna. 2015

Tomas Saraceno: Aerosolar Journeys Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig 2017

Tomas Saraceno: Cloud specific, Kemper Art museum St. Louis, 2014

Tomás Saraceno Cloud Cities Distanz 2011

Tomas Saraceno: Cloud Cities/Air-Port-City Kerber 2011

Aerocene Newspaper was produced on the occasion of COP 21 in Paris in 2015. It compiles a range of contributions from researchers, scientists and experts in the field including: Kiel Moe, Boris Groys, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Sanford Kwinter, Pierre Chabard, Oliver Morton, Olivier Michelon, Jol Thomson and Sasha Engelmann, Nicholas Shapiro and with a collaboration between Tomás Saraceno (Visiting Artist MIT), Leila Kinney (MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology), Lodovica Illari and Bill McKenna (MIT Department of Earth, Air and Planetary Sciences). The newspaper is available for free at all Aerocene events, launches and exhibitions around the world

This article explores the modes of atmospheric address emerging from experiments within the
stratosphere. To do so, it draws on archival material associated with Commander Malcolm D.
Ross who, during the 1950s and early 1960s, spent more time than any other person in the
stratosphere. Coupling accounts of Ross’s experimental ascents with his interest in creative writing and communication, this article uses three unopened envelopes carried by Ross into the stratosphere as a point of departure for layering together three strands of thinking. The first is a consideration of the stratosphere as a zone of exchange, experiment, and experience. The second is a reflection on the envelope as a spatiotemporal form, a limit, and a lure for thinking. The third is a discussion of the modes of atmospheric sensing made possible by stratospheric flights. These strands are worked together to develop a distinctive speculative mode of atmospheric address. Such modes of address can contribute to wider efforts across the geo-humanities to account for the differentiated materiality and movement of the earth’s atmosphere

This paper explores the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. It suggests that the task of marking the base of the Anthropocene's geological layer is entangled with questions about the human — about who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of ‘Anthropos’. It considers divergent ways of characterizing the geological force of the Anthropocene — as Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans — and situate this dispersal of the Anthropos within a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that occurs when human meets geology. It suggests that the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of ‘man’ — both his apotheosis and his eclipse.

In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethical-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us re-imagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.

This paper will discuss the potential danger of human expansion into the solar system with the current incomplete state of knowledge regarding Earth's complex ecological life support systems. The majority of space theorists see the vast resources of outer space as the key to our species' final release from biophysical constraints, providing solutions to ecological mismanagement and economic inequity across the planet. A critique of the Biosphere 2 experiment serves as the foundation for a contrary argument presented here. Recommendations for a new direction for closed biosphere research that would benefit our terrestrially bound society, as well as our long-term future in space, are then made.