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• 1 2018-08-28T03:47:17-07:00 Atmosphere as Aesthetics 5 Locating atmosphere worlds ... image_header 2018-10-18T23:48:13-07:00

  Merah Yuxin Zhang

  Considering the word atmosphere, I picture the earth’s misty, cloud-like layers. How is our earth’s atmosphere related to the daily use of the word atmosphere, in describing moods, senses, or perhaps just as some sensation that we are unable to fully articulate? Perhaps, this could be illuminated through an understanding of how and why ‘atmosphere’ is seen as an aesthetic concept. Böhme, in “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics”, offers a great starting point for my question – he identifies that “the quest for an aesthetics of nature…” results in an “aesthetics [which] is concerned with the relation between environmental qualities and human states” (114). It is exactly the “'and', this in-between” (114) where the physical environmental and human activities relate that is ‘atmosphere’. Here, "atmosphere" is probably a relational idea which encloses an on-going, perhaps multi-directional mediating process that permeates throughout all the elements in the ecology, the world we are inhabiting. This really expands my understanding of 'atmosphere' as either the geological atmosphere of the earth, or as the description of mood or senses. Later in the article, Böhme provides an overview of how the aesthetics of atmosphere is different from classical aesthetics characterised by rational ‘judgements’ which tend to overlook sensuous experiences, as well as how it expands the limits of the dominance of semiotics in aesthetics which tends to preoccupy with ‘meaning’ (119).
  
       Reading Böhme’s article, together with Ford’s “Aura in the Anthropocene”, I realised that the concept of atmosphere in aesthetics is inseparable from the idea of ‘aura’. Both articles direct me to Walter Benjamin’s famously written article “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in which he defines aura as:

  A strange tissue of space and time: unique appearance of distance, however near it may be. Resting on a summer evening and following a mountain chain on the horizon or a branch, which throws its shadow on the person at rest-that is to breathe the aura of these mountains or this branch. (15)

   
  
       What immediately captures my attention is the emphasis of aura as having both spatial and temporal dimensions. Later in the article, Ford specifically addresses how the temporal dimension of what is encompassed in the idea of aura might sometimes be overlooked. While recognising the temporal dimension of the aura, we formulate new ways of reading history – particularly, regarding the emergence of climate change as a historical event and the origins and impacts of it – in which I am keen in researching more.
  
       It also strikes me that there is an absence of the subjective noun in the sentence where Benjamin defines aura: “to breathe the aura…” is “resting on a summer evening…”. Who is there, to breath the aura, or resting? There seems to be nobody or no specific thing that initiates the actions. Perhaps, the omission of the subjectivity suggests that the aura is itself no 'thing' - a sense of permeability and inclusivity surrounding all substances and elements in the environment; it has no form - uncatchable upon any human attempt at drawing distinctions. This poses further questions on how distinctions, such as those between the subject and object, the particular and the university, are mediated, which I will research more about. I have also come across similar ideas of the aura and atmosphere in Chinese aesthetics, especially the classical poetics and painting, so I will also read more on how these are connected to the atmospheric thinking in Benjamin and Nietzsche.   
  
   
  
  Readings:
  
  Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version]: https://www-jstor-org.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/stable/27809424?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
  
  
  Gernot Böhme Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics:http://journals.sagepub.com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1177/072551369303600107
  
   
  Thomas H. Ford. Aura in the Anthropocene:http://er1.library.unsw.edu.au.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/er/cgi-bin/eraccess.cgi?url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/symploke.21.1-2.0065