Paper short abstract

This introduction sets out the panel's approach to winds and airs, exploring how attending to atmospheric elements - turbulence, dust, weather - shapes both our research practices and the stories the panel's papers tell.

Paper long abstract

This introduction opens the panel by reflecting on how winds and airs have shaped our own research practices and positionality. Rather than researching wind as an object of study from the outside, we work with and within it, attending to the contingency, openness and porosity that windy and atmospheric conditions demand of ethnographic and creative methods alike. We ground this approach in examples from our own fieldwork which set the tone for the panel's thematic structure. Organised across two sessions, the papers approach winds and airs through different modalities and elemental appearances: turbulence, dust, atmosphere and more. Across these papers, we ask: how do different methods and media attend to wind? What forms - ethnographic, artistic, scientific - are used to tell stories of wind and what stories do winds themselves tell?

Paper short abstract

This paper follows the wind's movement in Colorado Front Range hazardscape. Tracing the wind visualizes the varying and invisible multi-temporal hazards that extend from landscape and atmosphere to the body. Raising questions for resilience, this work unsettles and re-maps boundaries of local risk.

Paper long abstract

Resilience demands recognizing and communicating about layered and multi-temporal dangers. In the Colorado Front Range in western North America, hazards extend from the wildfire smoke and particulate matter that circulate in the atmosphere to the radioactive materials and other toxins that will long remain in the soil. Local contaminants are activated by the wind's force—where they are swept up and carried by the wind and inhaled through human breath—which expands the boundaries of the hazardscape from the environment to the body. This paper first traces the events surrounding the 2021 Marshall Fire, a wind-fueled grass fire that burned through a Front Range suburb with hours of wind gusts that at times exceeded 100 miles per hour. The Marshall Fire is noteworthy for how it entangled potential impacts of the fire itself and the region's other hazards across time, which include the lasting effects of the local mining, fracking, and nuclear industries. This paper will then contrast what I term the geographical performativity of local warning signs, designed to demarcate risk in place, with the boundary breaking work of the "wind's animacies"(Engelmann 2024). Following the movement of the wind visualizes the varying and typically invisible multi-temporal hazards that extend from landscape and atmosphere to the body raising questions for the narratives used to communicate danger. Crossing the borders of risk containment typically represented by warning signs, this paper employs the wind to unsettle and re-map the boundaries of local risk, opening-up alternative ways for understanding resilience in the hazardscape.

Paper short abstract

Wildfire smoke alters bodies, atmospheres, infrastructures, and sociality alike. This paper draws on ongoing research within Canada to propose the concept of smokeworlds as a methodological sensitivity and theoretical approach to tracing smoke through its ephemeral and durable characteristics.

Paper long abstract

Climate change troubles everyday life. Not only does climate alter the mundane practices that (re)compose quotidian life (Hulme, 2009), but it also troubles the distinctions between the mundane and the eventful as climate catastrophe seeps into bodies and rhythms of life (Anderson, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Tavory & Wagner-Pacifici, 2022). This paper introduces the concept of smokeworlds as methodological sensitivity and theoretical orientation which attempts to follow smoke through its atmospheric ephemerality and the traces it leaves behind. Drawing on Armstrong’s (2008) ‘glassworlds’ and Coleman’s (2020) ‘glitterworlds’, I define smokeworlds as particular situations in which wildfire smoke becomes entangled within the enacting of particular realities and their imaginaries. Using Alberta, Canada, a region known for its fires and increasing smokiness, I will draw on publicly available texts, interviews, and autoethnographic dairies from two seasons of fieldwork to develop two entangled smokeworlds: the sensory infrastructure of the Alberta Air Health Quality Index and the phenomenological lifeworlds of Albertans. Each situation reveals a different array of practices through which wildfire smoke is sensed and made sense of. Through these practices, incommensurable ontologies come to exist within the messiness of everyday life. From these examples, I explore themes of materiality, sense-making, breath and embodiment, and ontological disorientation. This paper will aim to open up conversations on how to study and interpret the uncertainty of life in fleeting and uncertain atmospheres, as well as to explore how altered atmospheric milieus inspire certain imaginaries through which past, presents, and futures become (re)articulated.

Paper short abstract

In Madrid, if wind gusts are forecasted above 65km/h, some parks are closed due to tree falling risk. However, if temperatures are too high, parks are closed even at a lower gust speed. In this paper, I will explore the complexities and tensions that unfold from the management of those closings.

Paper long abstract

In Madrid, in the event of “adverse weather conditions”, the eventual closing of some of the most important parks of the city is managed following an Action Protocol to prevent risk on the population, which mainly relates to the probability of falling branches or trees. These “adverse weather conditions” are defined by ranges of thresholds of forecasted wind gust speeds. Depending on the official forecasted wind gust speed, a different level of alert is declared (yellow, orange or red). When the alert level is red, risk is high, and parks are closed. These thresholds are also constrained by other variables that affect tree stability, like high temperatures (above 35ºC) and/or high humidity of the soil (75% of water saturation), which conversely trigger social and political debates; for example, when, counter-intuitively, parks can no longer serve as “climatic shelters” during very hot days.

Building on ethnographic work I conducted during the summer of 2025, in this paper I will explore the complexities and tensions of closing a park. In doing so I will propose to mobilise the concept of “municipal gust”, foregrounding the sometimes contradictory relations between bureaucratic logics, municipal departments and the socio-technical implications of Action Protocols, between notions of “natural” beauty and safety, or between the logics of tree conservation, landscape design and risk. From this discussion, and by putting it into relation to other municipal objects, practices, and procedures, I will develop the concept of the “municipal gust” as a partial, incomplete, siloed and fragmented bureaucratic object.

Paper short abstract

This paper draws on an artistic research experience situated within an eco-social conflict surrounding the installation of wind turbines in a high-biodiversity zone (Montaña Central Leonesa, Spain) to examine the role of models as tools for collective mediation concerning agreeable futures.

Paper long abstract

What forms of collective mediation exist in STS and artistic research to address territorial conflicts related to energy extractivism in the green transition? How can we develop mechanisms that help us understand the natural, material, but also political and civic realities behind the fight for wind sovereignty? These questions underpin the situated artistic research project ‘Modelar el aire’, which explored the conflicts surrounding the future of wind energy in the central mountains of León (Spain). This is a territory historically affected by energy extraction, and with the imminent installation of several wind and solar farms in one of the country's most biodiverse areas, a significant eco-social conflict has emerged.

The research developed a territorial model based on extensive fieldwork with stakeholders, affected individuals, scientists, and technicians. This made it possible to expand the boundaries, impacts, and territorial desires beyond a simple dichotomy regarding the (in)appropriateness of its installation. A physical model was created to represent diverse agents across different areas, illustrating how wind management could influence their future. Consequently, wind transitioned from being merely a climate factor to a strategic resource and catalyst for territorial change.

The proposed model, in turn, served as a platform where representatives, through role-playing, embodied various agents involved and mediated to reach agreements or resolve conflicts that would ensure a better future for the central mountains of León. This presentation will explore the tools and methodologies used, emphasising the model as a mechanism for debate rather than merely a representation of a fixed reality.

Paper short abstract

An artist and professor of fluid dynamics explore new perspectives on turbulent flows. We reframe the logic of “going with the flow” within turbulence research as a Capitalist common sense to question its environmental cost. We ask, “what if flows had rights in experiments?”

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to go with the flow? This phrase is used to express openness to drift and transformation: put less energy towards controlling your environment and surrender to currents to see where life takes you.

We are two researchers from the arts and field of fluid dynamics who have come together to explore new perspectives on turbulent flows. Here we offer a new perspective on the teaching that we should “go with the flow” by reflecting on this logic within turbulence research. Researchers rarely let turbulent flows move freely. They try to guide or interfere with the flow. “Passive control” places fixed objects or textures into the flow so that its movement changes without extra energy input. “Active control” adds energy to directly push the flow into a desired state. In both cases, turbulence is adjusted, calmed, or intensified depending on the goal. A successful intervention is defined in terms of efficiency, and the flow becomes a problem of optimization.

Our paper problematises “going with the flow” as a Capitalist common sense to question the environmental cost behind seemingly neutral ideas of efficiency. The study of turbulence is adding to its own problems; its environmental consequences generate further turbulence to study and control. From this critique, we propose a way forwards. Drawing from theories of more-than-human legal personhood, we ask, “what if flows had agency in experiments?” It could open new doors if we ask them what it meant to go with the flow.

Paper short abstract

This essay follows the movement of air as it becomes voice and song, as it inscribes itself in the body and echoes through time and space. It is based on research about sound recordings in former German East Africa and explores the role of sound in knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

The essay is the continuation of the 'first round' of a broken record (published here: https://www.moussemagazine.it/publishing/aaron-amar-bhamra-celine-mathieu-fugue-johanna-schindler-book-2025/), inspired by an actual broken wax cylinder once used to record indigenous vocals and instrument play in former German East Africa. Following the movement of vibrating air inscribed in the turning cylinder with a stylus and reproduced from these traces as audio tracks, the text suggests linearity, yet shifts slightly with each sentence, sometimes with each word, just to conclude a circle and begin again, or so it seems. The essay combines academic writing (my own and quotations) with popular cultural songs to reflect on the role of sound and voice in knowledge production, on embodied knowledge related to air, on echoes of the past as well as on colonial knowledge production.

“… how do you still trust the track which you believe someone composed and while you’re not sure whether that someone is present you’re definitely sure it’s not you, how do you stick to the imagecategory in your mind when the ground is shaking and your vision shifting and the sound dizzying and the air thickening, did you really think transparency was going to solve the issue, …”

Paper short abstract

Focusing on DIY making and noticing, this paper argues that air is made knowable through (non)human sensing practices. It explores how situated sense-making shapes—and is being shaped—through moments of uncertainty, negotiation, and shifting sensory attention.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, we explore how air can be made sense of—and known—with, through and alongside air sensors. Previous work attended to, for instance, “good enough” citizen air data (Gabrys et al., 2016), the calibration of DIY air sensors (Pritchard et al., 2018), and how pollution can be known through different forms of engagement beyond established air monitoring (Calvillo, 2018). We argue that assembling an air sensor kit already shapes the sense-making process before engaging with any sensor output. To do so, we created an air sensor kit, which we called Patchy Air. With Patchy Air, we explored DIY making (see Jungnickel, 2018) and noticing (see Tsing, 2020) as sense-making practices. We thus ask: How is air made knowable through situated sense-making practices in DIY air sensing?

While we collaborated on making the sensor kit and co-created knowledge throughout the process, the field notes are written and analysed by the first author. To highlight how situated sense-making informed how I came to know air, I drew on field notes, pictures, and the air sensor kit itself. Emerging themes highlight the material constraints, anticipations, and decisions on what counts as relevant to air sensing, which changed my sensory attention. Finally, our paper discusses how the DIY process—and sensing with, through, and alongside the air sensor kit—shifts our focus from the validity of air data to relating with the sensors, ourselves, and air itself.

Keywords: air, DIY air sensing, noticing, sense-making, autoethnography

Paper short abstract

This paper examines moss-based air filters that cool and purify the air. It analyzes how humans try to prove the air filters’ effects by quantification, and it reflects on air’s unruly spatiality, mobility, and temporality that eludes human fixation and measurement.

Paper long abstract

This paper traces troubled airs (Calvillo 2023) as they circulate through polluted urban spaces, ventilated moss surfaces, and engineered wind channels, asking how air—understood as a relational entity and social medium (Adey 2014; Horn 2018)—behaves in standardized laboratories, modelled outdoor settings, and in interaction with trees and other plants. Drawing on empirical and ethnographic research on air technologies, the paper examines human efforts to modify urban atmospheres by circulating air through ambient filters that cool and purify the air with moss. These techno-natural assemblages promise to render increasingly hot and polluted urban air healthier and more comfortable. The paper further shows how companies seek to demonstrate the efficiency of these arrangements by translating the activity and effects of air flowing through the moss-based air filters into quantifiable metrics, including temperature reduction and particulate matter removal. These effects are rendered comparable to the estimated benefits of trees, to human breathing volumes, or are expressed in degrees Celsius and micrograms. Beyond only partially measurable micro-scale reductions, the paper analyzes the broader political and social effects of these filters and their translated, quantified effects, including their role in experimental urban governance, the production of political legitimacy, and processes of public acceptance. Conceptually, the paper reflects on the spatiality, mobility, and temporality of air, highlighting its unruly nature, which eludes the logics of human quantification and visualization.

Paper short abstract

Storying Relations explores wind as an artistic–scientific method, using kite practices to build shared vocabularies between human and non-human agencies and to open new imaginaries for situated practices.

Paper long abstract

The proposal suggests a radical situating, positioning and locating (sich verorten) with, through, and in-between wind as an artistic and scientific research method and strategy to not only gathering information regarding the human and non-human environments but as a form of sensing, relating, and being-in-the-world. It is about our relation to all scales of wind, from the globally acting trade winds to our personal breathing, which actually resonates with the so called ‹scale effect› of aerodynamics (cf. Reynolds number).

Storying Relations proceeds from the research project Triple Instruments by Florian Dombois, in which a sound kite is flown on a piano wire, that is thread into a sound body on the ground. Triple Instruments are not only musical instruments, but also scientific instruments, and they are a model for a two-directional approach to nature. They have three sonic producers: a human being, a human-made object, and the non-human world. In order to literally explore the ‹metaphorical› qualities, the project invites peers from other disciplines who advance the transferability to and applicability in their fields of research.

In the Storying Relations we, an artist and a scholar in cultural science, propose kite flying as a way of relating to the world. It considers research as a temporal and social practice for extended audiences. It is a proposition of building an artistic, scientific, and social vocabulary in-between human and nonhuman agencies that can be flexibly applied in different space and time constellations and still be radically relatable and local.