ABSTRACT
Yuriko Furuhata explores the fog sculptures of artist Nakaya Fujiko. Nakaya’s deployment of fog and smoke recalls other expanded cinema practitioners and environmental artists in the postwar period, yet her experiments take on a different significance when seen not as a descendant of the phantasmagoria but as part of an assemblage linked to the development of smoke screens for aerial warfare. Paying particular attention to the dual function of fog screens—which obfuscate visibility yet also make visible such qualities as temperature, humidity, and wind—Furuhata historicizes the epistemological and political conditions behind the turn to fog and smoke within expanded cinema and the environmental arts during the Cold War. In so doing, Furuhata provides a geopolitically nuanced twist to the recent interest in ‘atmospheric media’ and ‘elemental media’.
