Air

A defining moment in this upward trajectory arrived with NASA’s first colour photograph of the Earth from space, taken only a few years before Ant Farm’s Inflatables . With Astronaut William Anders’s famous Earthrise image, which was taken onboard Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968, air was put in its place, not beyond the world, but instead as its vaporous skin, held in place by the planet’s gravitational pull. A paradigmatic shift occurred with the realisation that the gas and aerosol carapace surrounding our planet is as thin (relative to its mass) as the wall of a soap bubble (a few millionths of an inch thick) is to its volume. 6 With this first scientific view of our atmosphere, air lost something of its infinitude and phantasmal allure — the dominion over dream and spirit that had characterised the Weltlandschaft tradition — but, at the same time, it now assumed a new metaphysical significance as, in Steven Connor’s words, ‘a direction, an expansion, a multivectorial potential’. 7 For anthropologist Tim Ingold, the recognition of our shared immersion in the swirling, enveloping presence of the atmosphere meant acknowledging that ‘the world we inhabit, far from having crystallised into fixed final forms, is a world of becoming, of fluxes and flows’, or what he refers to as a ‘weather world’. 8 6 Barbara Clausen, ‘In the realm of spheres’, in Thin Skin: The Fickle Nature of Bubbles, Spheres and Inflatable Structures , Independent Curators International, New York, 2002, p.15. 7 Connor, p.35. 8 Tim Ingold, quoted in Caterina Albano, Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2022, p.3. Astronaut William Anders ’s Earthrise , taken onboard Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968 / Collection: The New York Public Library 57 56 Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art Prevailing currents: Towards an atmospheric imaginary in art