Materially Imagining Earth’s Atmospheres: Remembering/Futuring the Air in Breathable Artworks

Abstract: The air is hard to perceive as a material reality because we are so entangled in it. To remedy this “forgetting of air” (Irigaray, 1999) some artists from the early 1970s onward have moved beyond visual representation to create a new æsthesia of air, working with inhalable gases, odorous molecules and other volatile substances to bring the atmosphere back into people’s sphere of experience. Many of their works critically engage with the alarming changes of our aerobic environment in the context of the Capitalocene by mediating material encounters with past tropospheric conditions and potential atmospheric becomings—both material and temporal. This article examines a selection of contemporary breathable airworks that provide a sensory experience and an embodied understanding of evolving human-and-other-than-human-made airscapes across deep time and human time.