Going beyond how vital air has been to our philosophical, scientific, and technological pursuits, he also reveals the way that the artistic and literary imagination has been lifted through air and how, in air, cultures have learned to express and inspire each other. In this innovative cultural and scientific history, Peter Adey takes stock of the great ocean of air that surrounds us, exploring our attempts to understand, engineer, make sense of, and find meaning in it.Īdey examines how humans have managed and manipulated air as a natural resource and, in doing so, have been taken to the limits of survival, brought to high-altitude mountain peaks, subterranean worlds, and the troughs of new moral depths. Long one of the essential elements to life on earth-from the atmospheric composition that gave life to the coal-forming forests some three hundred million years ago to the air that fuels our most important technologies today-we think little of its incredible properties. Up in the Air wishes to place these contemporary societal questions in a broader investigative context that brings forth our relation to airspace regardless of the technologies at hand.Outside of yoga class, we don’t pay too much attention to the air we take in every day. President Barack Obama himself exemplified the not-in-my-backyard attitude beautifully when an UAV landed, well, in his backyard. The spiritual dimensions that seem to be closely related to an 'up there,' the hopes and dreams for which we turn our gaze up, the attempts to understand the intangible and sometimes invisible stand in stark contrast to the more practical, political and economic approaches that organize and regulate our use of air space in areas such as transportation, scanning and surveillance and air quality control.Ĭommercial development of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and the lack of a functioning legal framework in relation to it has turned the topic of how to run airspace into a burning issue. What does our sky consist of and which meanings does it bare? Which systems operate within and what are the legal frameworks that regulate this? How do we deal with this in a local/global context?Īrtefact 2016 aims to investigate the poetic, political and economic parameters that guide our relation to airspace. –Megan Prelinger, 'Charting the Sky: On The Atmosphere Guide by Amy Balkin'įor Artefact 2016: Up in the Air, we turn our gaze up towards the skies. The sky itself must be woven into the fabric of our societal sense of place.' '.our idea of the sky must be reconciled with what we do in it.

In a way, we become air-born(e) as soon as we leave the womb.' 'We come out into the air, reaching for it and bring it inside.

Air by Peter Adey