this is to draw connections btween a series of investigations weaponisatin of the air thinking about a kind of violenec taht is different to what fa usually works about – there is no bullet travellign through the air, the air itself is the subject

when you talk about the athmosherem you talk about different kinds of gasses and aerosols – depends on the optics you apply.

the last lecture ended with the question of what constitutes legal personhood rights are organised an individual, but can we think about rights of bigger ecological systems. what if a forest can be a legal ersn, have standing? then the question becomes what constitutes a forest. what is the political subject when we speak about environments.

thinking abou t the envirnment has to include the air. burning of rainforest in indonesia

teh investiogation moves from looking at the burned forest at the consequences of the burn – moving from teh landscape to environmental efffects in the air

the arson is not just used to manage the commercialis of the forest, but it also produced a lethal cloud in the air. these clouds follow a different kind of territory 2 kinds of territory: one defined by coastlines, borders 1 amorphous: clouds, but also a territoriality of action, a political territory both territories superimposed

people under the cloud weere placed under a state of emergency – a legal state that is defined by this amorphous cloud across borders – all of these diffeernt states are united in one knd of space

we usually think of a state of emergency as something constrained by hard borders, but in this case it’s defined by a moving cloud.

also the camp (there are no rights within the camp, its in a state of emergeny)

A kind of negative commons is defined. A political unit (the inhabitants of the cloud) on a continental scale becomes a site of suspension. THis is a view of our future (not the envornmental destruction), but the state of emergency across borders.

the athmosephere is the new frontier of colonialism people iin economoical, political power colonise it using co2 the idea fo a negative commons. inhabitants of a negative commons share a negative condition that calls for collective action.

teh forest turned into air comes down on singapore

this cloud is repsonsible for 10s of thousands of premature deaths in these countries

the diea of a premature death is unlike a casualit – death here becomes a statistical issue: it has an amorphous nature, has to be calculated using statstical tool. It’s for taht reason that these numbers where immediately contested by the authorities. They say 16 deaths (could be attributes to suffocation etc), vs 100,000 whic is a statsistical number, talks about lost years.

The fog is not only athmospheric but also epistemological the cloud is in the information sphere

athospheric violence has causality thath is har d to pin down fa calls this field causality

in kinetic violence, the force of say a bulet is so much bigger than any other forces present (gravity etc) that they converge to zero when you track them. YOu can draw a direct line of force, cusalit between the gun and the wall

the air however is always a composite – things react to wind direction, temperature, airborne particles already present. we’re looking at aa force with many authors, which makes it very hard to litigate

a big problem of movements like xr is that it’s hard to apply

suffocation: we cant breath killing of eric garner

the phrase i can’t breath connects black lives matter and the environmental movement

decolonise this place – against the whitney biennal board memeber selling teargas

when we breath, we breath together

teargas is designed to creat

teargas creates biochemal environment…power

the idea of controlling oyur behaviour by putting a sbstance in the air that surrounds you.

the paradox of teargas: developed for the trenches in ww1 (a chemical weapon) was banned in warfare under international agreements – if you’re an army you can’t use teargas on another one. but in your own state, the police can use it for crowd control. when the gas crosses a border, it becomes chemical warfarde, on our side of the border it’s legal.

killing by teargas canister in the west bank chlorine gas in syria

Here the gas is a way for the state to bring an area under it’s control. Sloterdijk calls it athmo-terrorism. The reason these weapons are so effective is ebyond the casalty number – the fact that you can hardly see them, that its unlcear wether they even happened, are terrorism. Terrorism is about turning the familiar (air) into something suspicious/ dangerous. Debates around wether tehse weapons have been used is used to seed terror in the populatoin. gas cloud/ disourse cloud.

urban scale gas is the same thing as planet scale weaponsation of teh air

nephanalysis of bomb clouds

a resident i gaza after isreali bombing says: i am breating my house, i am reathing my street – home has turned into aerosol particles

project for amnesty internations looking for clocks in images 9you have to do that when you have no digital meta data) – clouds became teh meta data. i fyou stufy the fluid dynamics, you can use them to measure time

this was the modern day version of a 19th century movement to classify clouds into genus and type. but the fact that they always move makes thi sdifficult. in landscape painting, you can be faithful to the bottom half of the images, but the top part is imaginary. when the lower part of the image moved toward modernity (using perspetives, lighting), the top half remained in the middle ages (about memory, used to convey mood, or the divine)

john ruskin tried to priduce a system and classification to capture the elusive sky. his drawings are tools for painters to make sense of the skies. the cloud crosses the border between art and science (like it crosses all other kinds of epistemological borders).

even when photography comes up, the exposure times were too long to capture clouds. it was the last thing to be captured by photography. cloud archives/altasses ring together artistic and scientific interest in understanding clouds.

in the 19th centur, they tried to classify ckouds is finite, tatic objects like plants, rocks, and architecture. john ruskin on turner: modern painters are interested in the effects of mist (unlike older panters who were interested in them as discreet objects)

one f his last textx: the storm cloud of the 19th century these clouds are not meterologicl objects, but the product of inustrualisation, labour exploitation. in the skies he sees class struggle.

clouds in gaza are made of everyting that houses were once made of. concrete, paint, cloth, drugs, human flesh – a temporary architecture in the air for about 8 minutes until they dissipate. (schupplis book talks about this)

tocic clouds

2008 gaza conflict project a new kind of explosion was seen in the sky these are the result of white phspherous shells fired from israel after denying it at first , isreal admitted they were using the munition, but said they were using it legally (it’s allowed to make smoke screes) – but in fact it was used here to drive people out of their homes, as a weapon of terror

according to the lawers of the other sides, the study of architecture wa outside the scope of architecture

also the german shootign investigation (cloud froma gunshot)

teargas is the contrary to the democratic gathering of bodies. teargas is cetrifugal

in hong kong, th cloud that moves up into high rises, down into teh subway creates a political space – once you become an inhabitant of the cloud, it calls on you to take political action

whitney case this was maybe the first tme that the museum wasnt a neutral platform to show violence, but the museum was actually complicit in the violence. one of the chairmen made his wealth (which eh gives to the museum) from manufacturing teargas

triple chaser investigation rendered images to train image classifier

the training set works for two audiences: in the gallery (as a video), and for the classifier during training. this is combined with a youtube scraper

airquakes

Finally: Australian fire