#climate

online / July 22, 8:00 PM

I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.

Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine

From boundary conditions to absolute presence

The omnipresence of #climate is founded on its grounding in time and space – both being content-filling and constantly expanding and shifting their boundaries, operating according to the principles of entropy; a diffuse yet gradual incision of the epidermis. Spatial-temporal suspensions, the mixing of environments, and the production of nature cultural hybrids with the marginal, yet supremely perceptible, company of homo sapiens, whose errors are sometimes derivative for biodiversity but also extinction, are the subsoil of #climate.

Nicolas Carrier and Marie Ouazzani in Weather Print build a kind of linear narrative out of (un)everyday atmospheric phenomena, attempting to dissect a kind of weathered continuity in history, linking events to the exponential rise of carbon oxides in the atmosphere. The monumental surroundings that have grown out of modernism are not the only result of the implementation of Enlightenment reflections – others are observed through the elevation of the digitus (Latin for finger).

Futurological narratives, collapsing the linear temporal structure by drawing on different modes of modality – Przemek Wegrzyn’s Scarcity should be set in these registers. From the desolate, depleted spaces, the news of untimely events is carried – a danger that, as in Hölderlin, when it rises, increases the chance of salvation.

With Niklas Goldbach, we turn our gaze towards the Californian coast – we arrive at the Salton Sea, a hollowed-out piece of land that had its moment of glory in the second half of the last century. Anthropopression led to the creation of this resort as a result of chance, but also disintegration as a result of chemical pollution. Accompanying the journey, advertising the miracle in the middle of the desert transforms the wilderness into a dreamy, capitalized mirage along with the all-encompassing space, intensifying with each passing day with the power of the sun.

Breathing as a basic life function, the limes of life and non-life is the fuse for ASMR for Earthly Survival by the Post-Bio-Internet Collective. The sensory stimulus, evoked by a combination of visual and auditory messages, is not intended to prompt empathy or care – rather, it is an attempt to trepan the body, engage the subcutaneous mode, and inscribe survival into the conditions of life-breathing as a practice of presence.

The fact that humans occupy a marginal position in #climate does not mean that they have disappeared – they still sit in front of the screen, coolly searching for themselves in the metrified landscapes.