Air

Aerocene community. Everyone is invited to launch their own sculpture, with building and borrowing instructions freely available on the Aerocene website. This ethos of shared knowledge and inclusion seeks to nurture a process that would enable us to move towards alternative futures together. Aerocene Backpacks are part of a larger family of aerosolar sculptures, some of which are certified to lift human passengers using only the air and the heat of the Sun. In 2020, Fly with Aerocene Pacha achieved solar-only ‘lighter-than- air’ human flight. This journey set 32 unprecedented world records, recognised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), with Aerocene pilot Leticia Noemi Marqués, who flew with the message ‘Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium’ written with the communities of Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina. More than simply a flight, this project stood in solidarity with the indigenous people of Salinas Grandes, who for years have raised their voices against harmful lithium extraction practices in northern Argentina. In this way, Aerocene looks to a new way of moving and living in our age of planetary climate crisis. Planning towards a future in which such flexible flight is available and illustrating how the sculptures making up Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms would float during the day and night, the Aerocene App 2018–ongoing channels real-time data on global weather, airstreams and forecasts into a route- planning system that allows viewers to map flight paths, from Brisbane to Berlin, for instance. Saraceno reflects on the broader impact of such changes: These aerosolar forms ask us to speculate on what kinds of nomadic sociopolitical structures might emerge if we could navigate the rivers of the atmosphere, reconsidering the energy regimes that sustain current logics of movement and dramatically affect vulnerable subjects, humans and non-humans alike. Saraceno reminds us how deeply, if invisibly, we are all connected. He issues a call to reframe our economies of extraction and contribute to a just energy transition, to work together to create the future we wish to see. GB Working across the fields of science, engineering, art, philosophy and community organising, in 2015 Saraceno founded the Aerocene Foundation, inviting us to join him in a new era which he calls the ‘Aerocene’. As he says: The international Aerocene community calls for a different way of living independent from fossil fuels. More deeply attuned to our environment, new infrastructures are imagined through the process of working in collaboration with each other, our ecologies and the atmosphere we rely on. Deeply concerned about the politics of air, Saraceno asks us to pay attention to the quality of the air we breathe today. As he says, ‘The dream of flight has become a nightmare. At any given time there will be 1.3 million people travelling through the air, entire petrocapitalist flying cities that release 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually’. We do not all breathe the same air 2018–ongoing redeploys long strips of paper tape produced by air-pollution monitoring machines, Beta Attenuation Mass Monitors (BAM), to reveal the varying levels of particulate matter contained in the air we inhale. The work’s long lines of light and dark grey spheres not only suggest the faint forms of planets or distant moons but also reveal the particles each invisible breath we take carries into our bodies. Saraceno points out that we do not all breathe the same air: rather, the quality of the air we breathe depends very much on socio-geographic factors, with serious cumulative impacts for health and life spans. Each breath we take is not only crucial to life but also may be deadly, depending on where we live. The Aerocene Backpack 2016–ongoing links the critical reflections of We do not all breathe the same air and the speculative space of Saraceno’s larger installation with a tangible, embodied sense of how the Aerocene might change our daily lives. The backpack contains a portable ‘floating starter kit’: an aerosolar sculpture that, when unfurled outside, would use the energy of the Sun to inflate and rise into the atmosphere, without the use of fossil fuels, helium, hydrogen, solar panels, lithium batteries or burners. The aerosolar sculpture exhibited is equipped with sensors to capture data, such as temperature, humidity, pressure and air quality, open-source tools developed by the global (above and pp.86–7) Tomás Saraceno / We do not all breathe the same air 2018–ongoing 85 84 Atmosphere Atmosphere