ABSTRACT
To what extent might we learn to read our atmosphere as a historical register to understand air as a document—and in so doing to help make visible the complex dynamics by which our own lives and surroundings are bound up in producing a changing climate? These questions are taken up by a series of projects by architects and artists that propose ways in which our atmosphere can be understood as an archive—documented empirically and recorded with managerial rigor, even opening the possibility of reconstituting historical moments (whether of pollution or more everyday airs). After exploring a set of philosophical texts that ground this interpretation of air as medium, this chapter discusses seven such projects that take the atmosphere as a central site of evidence and action.
