Description
Book SynopsisDerek P. McCormack analyzes artistic, political, and technological uses of the balloon to show how its properties and capacities are central to understanding how we sense, perceive, and modify meteorological and affective atmospheres as well as the force of the atmosphere in modern life.
Trade Review"Derek P. McCormack offers a unique perspective on the relationship between object and atmosphere ... This title brings a fresh lens to topics as diverse as sensory perceptions, the concept of allure, and understandings of volume. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and researchers." -- C. Leachman * Choice *
"Atmospheric Things offers a bold new intervention in the study of media infrastructures with incredible lucidity. . . . This book will be instrumental to media scholars interested in new ways of thinking about the intersecting lines of infrastructure, affect, meteorology, envelopment, and even trauma and objecthood, where both human and nonhuman agencies from bodies to balloons are theorized in terms of the atmospheric. By inviting scholars to consider that the allure of atmospheres rests in its resistance to full perception and sense, and that the free-floating dirigibility of balloons offers productive ways to imagine and experience atmospheres, McCormack lays the groundwork for future work in atmospheric infrastructures and opens room for the enchanting, generative possibilities of simply letting go." -- Miguel Penabella * Synoptique *
"A thoughtful, challenging and very perceptively written work. . . . This book is very much about finding new and experimental ways, using the atmospheric thing of the balloon, to make explicit the atmosphere as a political, ethical and aesthetic commons." -- Marijn Nieuwenhuis * Social & Cultural Geography *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Envelopment 17
2. Sensing 35
3. Allure 55
4. Release 79
5. Volume 101
6. Sounding 121
7. Tensions 145
8. Hail 171
9. Elements 195
Notes 219
Bibliography 259
Index 279
