Cloud Atlas__beta [2023]

image__> Cumulus humano. clouds that have been entirely customized through a design process. Responding to the motivations of the financial elite, these clouds are unique formations created digitally as one would a 3D model, and then aircraft-seeded in the low trosposphere to create liminal shapes of teddy bears, pets, handbags, faces, marriage proposals etc.  Excerpt from Video and physical atlas

Presentations:
“Forecast” Group exhibition, curated by DesignTO. Jan 11th – feb 4th 2023

Look up in the sky, what do you see? Clouds, that are the subject of youthful joy, the very epitome of dreams and weightlessness, are now also the site of dramatic and potentially irreversible geo-interventions in the name of climate mitigation.

Cloud Atlas__beta is a work of speculative design that aims to present an alternative perspective to the general rhetoric of climate mitigation, exploring the dramatic shifts to the colors, shapes and experiences of the everyday that solar geoengineering will create.  In emerging policy recommendations targeting climate mitigation, cloud-seeding is one radical proposal under the umbrella strategy of climate geoengineering (defined by the University of Oxford’s geoengineering program as “the deliberate large-scale intervention into the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change”) that would raise the density and reflective quality of clouds to deflect the sun’s heat away from the earth.  

This atlas outlines potential strategies and particulates that will feature in future research and deployment, building on nascent scientific research around Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and the inorganic/bio-engineered particles that would factor in it. Cloud Atlas__beta provides updated nomenclature for such anthropogenically derived clouds that contributes to a novel sky, a visual aesthetic of the everyday that may be elided in the technocratic drive towards engineering the ultimate solution. The atlas aims to provide new visibility for the traces of intervention in the skies above us, and with this new resource, the very act of identifying the clouds becomes a radical political act that holds us witness to the lived reality of climate mitigation strategies.  At the current nexus of dramatic and urgent climate change on the one hand; relentless progress in synthetic biology and techno-solutionism on the other, how might future proposals of bio-engineered interventions combine (and conflate) the complex value systems embedded within each. Could synthetic clouds built through a mixture of scientific ingenuity and design thinking be the new vehicles for carbon capture and solar radiation management? How might that change the aesthetics of our everyday life? How might this emerging notion of “air-at-work” change our experience of wonder, scale and the sublime?

The project is supported by Alex Di Nunzio (3D scenography and cloud-creation pipeline) and Natalie Plociennik (graphic design).

A list of useful references:

Asayama, S., Sugiyama, M., Ishii, A. and Kosugi, T. (2019), Beyond solutionist science for the Anthropocene: To navigate the contentious atmosphere of solar geoengineering. The Anthropocene Review6(1-2), pp.19-37.

doi:10.1177/2053019619843678

Barad, K. (2011), Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19(2), pp.121-158. Vancouver Open access: https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/publications/pdfs/barad-natures-queer-performativity.pdf

Biermann, F. and Möller, I. (2019), Rich man’s solution? Climate engineering discourses and the marginalization of the Global South. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 19(2), pp.151-167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-019-09431-0

Burns, W. and Strauss, A. (Eds.). (2013), Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues, and Governance Frameworks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139161824

Edwards, P,  (2010),  A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, And the Politics of Global Warming.  MIT Press

Delort A.M. et al. (2017), Clouds: A Transient and Stressing Habitat for Microorganisms, Chénard C., Lauro F. (eds) Microbial Ecology of Extreme Environments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51686-8_10

Furuhata, Y, (2019), Of Dragons and Geoengineering: Rethinking Elemental Media.   Media+Environment 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10797. https://mediaenviron.org/article/10797-of-dragons-and-geoengineering-rethinking-elemental-media Accessed Oct 2021

Fleming, J. R,  (2010),  Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.  Columbia Press. 

Gabrys, J,  (2016), Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. University of Minnesota Press.

Glaisher, J.  2019.  The High Regions,  The Aeronauts: Travels in the Air.  Melville House Publishing.Herzog, H, J., (2018). Carbon Capture.  MIT Press

House of Commons: Science and Technology Committee, (2010),  The Regulation of GeoEngineering: Fifth Report of Session 2009-10

Huang S, Hu W, Chen J, Wu Z, Zhang D and Fu P.(2021), Overview of biological ice nucleating particles in the atmosphere. Environ Int. 2021 Jan;146:106197. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2020.106197.

David K. (2010), Engineering the Planet, Climate Change Science and Policy by S. Schneider and M. Mastrandrea,. Washington DC: Island Press.

Keith, D, (2013), A Case for Climate Engineering MIT Press

Kolbert, E and Lowman, R.  2021, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.  Crown.    

Lagriffoul, A.; Boudenne, J.-L. et al, (2010), Bacterial-based additives for the production of artificial snow: What are the risks to human health? Sci. Total Environ. 2010, 408, pp1659–1666

Lawrence, M.G., Schäfer, S., Muri, H. et al. Evaluating climate geoengineering proposals in the context of the Paris Agreement temperature goals. Nat Commun 9, 3734 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05938-3


McCormack, D. P., (2018),  Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment. Duke University Press. 

Morton, O.,  (2016)  The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering could Change the World.  Princeton University Press.Oxford Geoengineering Programme, (2018),  What is Geoengineering? http://www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/index.html. Accessed Jan 10 2022.

Preston, C. J., (2018),  The Synthetic Age.  MIT Press

Black Vault unclassified, Project Cirrus, Final Report on Contract W -36-039-SC-32427

https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/weather/CirrusFinal.pdf.  Accessed Feb 2 2022

Randerson, J.,  (2018),  Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art, MIT Press.

Redford, K and Adams, B. (2021), Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology.  Yale University Press.