Paper short abstract:

I consider artistic enactment of the atmosphere in China as a fully condensable thing, a substantial mix containing and passing through the bodies and architectures of the contemporary city. I ask into thinking of atmospheric embroilments as the site of possible and sometimes dangerous condensations.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013, the Beijing city government announced a short-lived collaboration with experimental art and design house, the Danish Studio Roosegarde, to install devices in the city's parks, that would collect ambient particulate matter with low-power electromagnets, carving out pockets of clear air in the city's infamously dense atmosphere. These towers aimed to generate not only moments of clarity in conditioned airspace - absence as aesthetic environmental intervention - but also, with its store of collected atmospheric carbon, to create diamonds, each pressed out of a determinate volume of the city's sky. While the project remains in the waiting room of state red tape, Chinese commodity and art projects have emerged in recent years that have not simply noted the air pollution in the city as an assault on urban life, but indeed, to materialize the atmosphere as a dispersed solid, one that could be collected through filters, machines, and the human respiratory apparatus.

In this paper, I consider this artistic enactment of the atmosphere as a fully condensable thing, not simply the medium of city life in three dimensions, but as a substantial mix containing and passing through the bodies and architectures of the contemporary city. I ask into the atmosphere and a politics of suspensions, thinking of atmospheric embroilments as the site of possible and sometimes dangerous condensations. As these programs rework the sky into a warren of nested interiors and exteriors I ask into the possibilities of altered life in solid air, in China and beyond.