Enclosures of Wind: Practice-Led Methods for Visualization of Elemental Media

Introduction

Wind is a peculiarly multiscalar form of energetic transfer. In many strands of the environmental sciences, an accurate depiction of wind patterns is central to the design of environmental models. From the massive energy transport of the jet stream to the local gusts and bursts, wind not only is spatially situated but defines space. Wind and other dynamic, volumetric aspects of weather are space-creating, from local climates to large-scale patterns. In addition to what could be coined the elemental media or ecomedia (Peters 2015; López et al. 2023) of wind, technical forms of wind management have gradually emerged in software across recent decades since at least the 1980s. From wind tunnels to virtual wind, the design aspect of wind—in and of space—becomes a central element along the engineering-modeling-media nexus of contemporary practices. In computer graphics of wind, local and global winds are detailed in coded form as they engage with the solids of digital worlds, giving rise to models of buildings as in Linxue Li’s thermodynamic architecture (Li and Tao 2018) and to landscape design practices such as the Sand Engines, first devised by studio H+N+S (Holmes 2020). Different scales of wind can thus be spatial from the local to the planetary, and they can be about crisscrossing forces that feature epistemic instruments ranging from scientific models to gamelike computational environments. While modeling the generative force of wind, the question of enclosures is also at play, both architecturally and in economic terms, such as wind energy (see Wong 2024, in this special issue; on politics and architectures of air and toxicity, see Calvillo 2023).

Our article engages with the planetarity of wind that we rescale onto three instances: an image, a building, and a model. They are considered as interrelated epistemic-aesthetic spheres of encapsulation. The approach to multiscalarity stems from practice-based research and methods in contemporary arts that frame air currents where the realization that the history of wind in the technical media age—at least since the anemometer of Louis-Léon Pajot in 1734—is paralleled by the apparatuses through which it becomes graspable. As part of the history of the graphic method, but also informing more recent experimental data practices such as autographic visualization (Offenhuber 2023), the variety of technical forms of air, currents, and energy are exposed to a specific aesthetic format of knowing. Various artistic projects, from Florian Dombois’s wind tunnel constructions to J. R. Carpenter’s (2020) poetic writing and framing a “picture of wind,” stand out as existing examples of an epistemology of proxies. Many more could be mentioned, like Harun Farocki’s investigation of wind in computer graphics in the Parallel video series (2012–14) and recent work such as Victor Mazón’s installation of soundscapes of wind turbines as part of the Motores del Clima exhibition in Gijon, Spain (2023–24) (Mazón and Parikka 2024). A similar theme with an angle to public art and ecological contexts of sound was presented in Marie Højlund and Morten Riis’s take on wind music with wind turbines in the Danish countryside (Højlund and Riis 2020).

Based on Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s artistic work and his ongoing—during the writing of this article—practice-led research for an exhibition at the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia (FCAYC) in León, Spain, our focus on air is in dialogue with scholars such as Giuliana Bruno (2022), who recently framed the environmental condition of contemporary arts through atmospheres of projection. In Bruno’s case, projection concerns both the literal sense of a space being defined by atmosphere (habitability, breathability) and especially in the cinematic sense of image projection that is organized in and organizes atmospheric media environments. Atmospheres are thus also affective: space is activated through artistic methods using large-scale surfaces in and out of galleries and experimental projection methods. In this text, however, we expand on how such an environmental media condition shifts beyond the cinematic projection to encompass different scales of images as they feature and frame spatial and architectural contexts. Gil-Fournier’s solo exhibition and its curatorial framing by Alfredo Puente, The Raft: Three Acts for an Exposure to the Elements at the FCAYC, are viewed in respect to these conversations in art and elemental media through the artistic pieces and the broader narrative framing that we will engage with throughout the text. Hence, the stakes of this article relate both to the broader elemental media and art theory discussions on scales of planetary materiality and also, significantly, to the work of curatorial and art practices as processual engagement with this question.

Our text engages with the aesthetics of air as it becomes spatialized, managed, and rescaled across different spatial configurations in the context of an art exhibition. We aim to build an argument concerning wind, air currents, and cultural techniques of visualization and circulation where the artistic works and the exhibition space in León act as a laboratory of sorts (Latour and Weibel 2007; Carreira 2024). As a test site, these techniques generate images and trigger diachronic and synchronic relations to different spatial forms that help to understand the artistic method and the broader question about the aesthetics of wind across scales. Our text has been written in the midst of the installation process and includes many curatorial considerations, showing the processual nature of setting up artistic work in relation to existing exhibition space and the broader landscape.

While we want to highlight this process and curatorial context, the main theme of the article and the practice-led works is to build a media ecological trajectory for air and atmosphere. For this trajectory, these strands are situated in the history of science of controlled environments, from air pumps to bubble chambers to the Schlieren photography mechanism. Relatedly, Yuriko Furuhata (2022, 48–79) has shown how the development of controlled indoor air-conditioning techniques influenced the development of meteorology, as it is linked to the building of computer rooms and data centers devoted to numerical simulation. We focus instead on transparent enclosed environments that involve image-based methods of observation, simulation, and reconstruction. This bundles another methodological trajectory into the task: what does it mean to reconstruct a framing of wind, air, and currents, and how can this be seen as an investigation of contemporary atmospheres? How can the gallery space feature in this? How do material limitations and conditions of curatorial practice fit into the attempt to address multiscalar planetary space? While some earlier media-historically significant examples (such as Étienne-Jules Marey’s graphic method) have offered inspiration for later reconstructions (as in 1999 at the Cinémathèque française) and applied work (like Dombois’s artistic projects with wind tunnels), a related strategy is at play in Gil-Fournier’s work. However, here the aim is not a scientifically accurate reconstruction but a media archaeological rewiring that aims to make sense of current questions of air, wind, and planetary scale environmental media by recursively referring to earlier architecture-imaging systems.

Three key sections and components structure this text: addressing the narrative theme of planetarity; how this is manifested and managed at the interface of the gallery space and the surrounding valley landscape; and what role images play in this mediation of local and planetary.

Planetary Enclosure

Gil-Fournier’s solo exhibition addresses planetarity through the figure of the raft, a reference to Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19). The brief features implicitly in the different pieces: to what extent can a cultural institution such as the FCAYC be understood as a place in which to think about planetarities different from the economic and cultural commodification and exploitation? ^[1] In this regard, The Raft is a reference not only to the FCAYC foundation as an institution but also to its materiality as a building and an enclave in the valley of the river Porma. This aspect is a starting point for reimagining planetarity as a concept and is continually referenced in the project. It is also a key background for the different sections of this text that deal with how space encloses and articulates wind—and the lack of wind—at alternating scales.

As such, we are focused on the curatorial settings—both the narrative dramaturgy of the artistic works and the material elements—in close dialogue with the artistic works by Gil-Fournier.^[2] The writing of this article is part of the research contributing to the exhibition’s final design. Therefore, this article is not a report of a final artistic product but a processual element in the methodology of how to work with wind, space, and material assemblages of the curatorial space.

The curatorial setting features a dramaturgy of scales, dialogues, and themes that closely resonate with recent scholarly discourse concerning the nonhuman as well as the broader elemental media more widely conceived. The works are closely related to Gil-Fournier’s development of artistic methods for environmental media and the expansion of the body of work in cultural techniques (Siegert 2015; Winthrop-Young, Iurascu, and Parikka 2013). Rescaling planetarity as a patchwork of discontinuities and management of lands, wind, air, and other elemental forces responds to broader questions of climate change. From an artistic research perspective, it also presents a curatorial approach to ecomedia (López et al. 2023), where the symbolic and the material are brought into close dialogue.

The artistic pieces in the exhibition are planned as installations that record or address traces of the planetary scale. As such, the exhibition space seeks to rearticulate the relationship of scales beyond mechanisms of comparison and visual projection. This microcosmos of sorts is meant not to track a representational theme of the planet but to grasp the forces that make up different scales of planetarity, a theme that has become broadly discussed in the humanities (Chakrabarty 2022; Mbembe 2019; Parikka 2023; Spivak 2012; Likavčan 2019). It also resonates with other research-led curatorial practices of past years, such as the Weather Engines exhibition in 2022 (Athens, Onassis Stegi) and its second iteration in Spain, Motores del Clima (2023–24, Gijon, Laboral). The use of exhibition space and different modes of imaging continues Georges Didi-Huberman’s point, first articulated in relation to Marey’s wind tunnels: “How could an experimental image, inevitably local since it results from a specific instrumentation applied to particular phenomena, be capable of globally modifying our perception of the world?” (Didi-Huberman 2023, 227; italics in original). Instead of wind tunnels, Gil-Fournier constructs other kinds of visualizations of air and wind as planetary phenomena on a local scale. This article is thus articulated in relation to the different scales of containment and openness of wind and the image instruments and spaces that articulate them, from the use of projections onto walls and echoes from the surrounding valley landscapes to the images that circulate and capture air and wind as localized planetarity.

In the case of The Raft: Three Acts for an Exposure to the Elements, three dramaturgical acts articulate the curatorial space and the image instruments in operation there. The first of these acts features an installation in which two laser level lines, a standard instrument used in installing exhibitions, are projected onto a wall. The distance between the two lines is just below one centimeter, which refers to the impact a three-degree planetary temperature rise will have on the ocean-level horizon. These two straight lines are disconnected through an inclined plane that amplifies their distance, repositioning it for the exhibition viewer but also as a particular measurement line, implying a point about projective relation to such a simple graphic method. The plane that amplifies the lines is part of the building. In this project, the building is transformed (a plate of the room’s ceiling enclosure will be lowered) into an invitation to approach the space between the two horizons.

The most visible element of the installation is the gap opened in the ceiling of the building, which is replicated in the projected horizons: interrupted by the bodies of visitors to the exhibition, the lines function as a temporary live autograph – an evanescent register – of the bodies in the room. In addition to this installation, a series of canvases in the room reproduce the double horizon in a series of data images elaborated out of references from the history of painting. Each canvas in the series, using a selection of seascapes by mainly nineteenth-century artists, reproduces only the horizon line from the original painting, drawn as a double line on the blank canvas. Displaying the same interruptions of the horizon line in the original painting, the doubled horizon becomes a kind of data register for events pictured as a seascape. The space between the two horizons becomes the distance to these seascapes, not only to a cultural context of the past, but a past climate as well.

Figure 1:Two laser levels project the distance between present and future horizon lines due to ocean level rise.

Left: Installation view; right: detail. Photograph by Juan Baraja. Courtesy of Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia.

In the second act, two installations address the difference in time scales between the human and the deep inhuman (Hui 2019). The second act refers to Vitruvius’s architectural concept of the acoustic jar and features them as models, producing a nested sense of sound and resonance. The amplifying devices work across the exhibition space, the building, and the surrounding valley. The first installation is a circle of twenty-four large handmade terracotta jars, each placed on a potter’s wheel the size of the jar’s base. A series of motors make every other jar turn counterclockwise, while the odd jars in between turn clockwise thanks to friction. The handmade and thus slightly irregular jars are not exactly circular, so the motorized jars rub against their neighbors. These frictions and collisions do not derail the jars but produce a resonant sound between the jars that fills the space of the room, while the friction itself tends to be removed by the system, as the excess of touch that erodes the surfaces of the jars produces a fine dust that accumulates in traces along the floor below.

The second installation contains recordings of a shepherd calling for a lost animal in a valley near the exhibition venue. The village in which the foundation is located is situated next to the river Porma. The river descends from the Cantabrian Mountains on its southern slope. Its course has given rise to a large transversal valley, with a north-south disposition, in which small hollows can be found between hills, such as the one chosen for these recordings. In a circle one hundred meters wide and traced along the dynamic terrain of the valley, eight microphones captured and recorded the shepherd’s calls. These recording points are replicated by loudspeakers placed throughout the room in a smaller (four-meter) circle; the room becomes an acoustic transposition, activated as a second valley, photographic as the negative of the recording and the positive of sound projection, featured together. The voice of the shepherd echoes through the valley and the room. By problematizing strict divisions of enclosures through acoustic means, this virtual space suggests a multiplication of differences along a continuum.^[3] As anthropologist Timothy Choy has noted: “Air disrespects borders, yet at the same time is constituted through difference” (Choy 2011, 165; on multiscalarity of air, see Calvillo 2023).

Figure 2:The synchronized recording process in the Lobinares valley (left) and the resonant circle of acoustic jars (right).

Photographs by Alfredo Puente and Juan Baraja. Courtesy of Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia.

The third act and dramaturgical theme concerns wind. Here, wind is both an architecturally managed current and a landscape-scale force. In this act, the relationship between building, materiality, and exterior is embodied mainly in the figure of the transparent container and the particular space of inside-outside relations that it articulates. Although visually it seems to break the separation between inside and outside, this separation is maintained and mobilized in other dimensions, reminding us to reflect even further on the differential powers of air and wind that Choy elaborated.

Figure 3:A still from one of the videos, Villafranca de los Caballeros 31.05.2023, in the third act. Courtesy of Abelardo Gil-Fournier.

The Volumetric Cut

The volumetric cut is a central element for Gil-Fournier. It helps to address the connection between image (visualization of air) and architecture (the container, the sphere, the bubble). Echoing the work of Sloterdijk (2011) but executed as an artistic installation, Gil-Fournier’s interest in creating subtle multiscalar enclosures of wind and atmosphere emerges as a central element in how the bubble was also materialized as one of the objects. This articulates what planetarity of wind rescaled onto a model and a building means: both concrete enclosures and also model miniatures of sorts.

A series of videos in the exhibition captures this operation of transparent spheres placed in the landscape.^[4] The experimental setup consists of a sphere mounted on a large homemade tripod in order to produce two cuts in the body of the tree agitated by the wind: in the first cut, one of the branches of the tree or bush in each of the videos has been inserted inside the sphere; in the second cut, the moving image of the sphere and the tree is registered into a two-dimensional video. The videos display isolated trees and large bushes shaken by the wind. The point of view and the composition repeat the same pattern: the central plant stands out in the foreground against a free horizon that lets the sky occupy most of the background of the image. With the sky in the background of the tree, the inside of the sphere is clearly visible. There, as if the sphere had opened a volumetric cut, the wind disappears. The movement of branches and leaves caused by the wind has hardly any appreciable effect on the leaves isolated by the bubble.

The volumetric cut opens two instances central to understanding the techniques of containment and image at play. In the first instance, the enclosure of wind and atmospheres forms a broader theme that captures what is meant by the planetary in curatorial and artistic settings. As we argue in a different context (Gil-Fournier and Parikka 2024), early modern chemical experiments on air proved more than the exact composition of atmospheric gases. In eighteenth-century works such as Joseph Priestley’s, the enclosure of air becomes an experimental architectural model for air-conditioning, which we can track as a media archaeological topoi (Huhtamo 2011) across different scales of its appearance: a sealed but transparent container appears as the laboratory jar; the Wardian case in the transport of live plants in the nineteenth century; the greenhouse, terraria, and ecospheres that followed; the invention of the notion of biosphere, and so forth (Gil-Fournier and Parikka 2024; Connor 2010, 19). The transparent glass cases gradually became carefully managed and crucial laboratory instruments (Espahangizi 2015). Already in Priestley’s case (see figure 4), they functioned as a model of the atmosphere of the planet. This represents a particular case of capture and visualization working through the mini-architecture of the jar while at the same time offering a new way of understanding the architectures of air as those of gases. This should also be taken into account in any sufficiently updated version of elemental media: we are dealing with chemical compounds, not mythological accounts.

Figure 4:Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, by Joseph Priestley (1776).

Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Public domain. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/umwxygfa.

If we look at Priestley’s experiments, the insertion of plants inside transparent sealed containers established a relationship between the interior of an isolated container and the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. The British chemist’s experiment consisted of placing a small mint plant into a container, the air inside of which was transformed by a selected process. These processes could be animal respiration—a mouse placed inside, for example—or the combustion of a small flame, such as that created by a candle. Priestley observed how the plant slowed or even counteracted the stuffiness of the air due to the breathing of the mouse or the burning of the candle. With the plant inside, the mouse could survive inside the sealed bubble, and the candle burned for much longer. Priestley’s example showed one version of air-conditioned habitability and optically transparent observability meshed together.

Priestley’s experiment was interpreted in atmospheric terms.^[5] On a planetary scale, plant respiration could compensate for the large-scale effects of animal respiration in a similar way as in the sealed bubble. The dynamic equilibrium of gases inside these glass containers thus functioned as an analogue model in the scientific and architectural sense. It is important to note how this model implies two operations at once. On the one hand, the equating of these differently scaled volumes of planetary atmosphere and local air shows how an experimental material culture of devices is the operative hinge that enables more abstracted notions at a different scale. On the other, this procedure also transforms the concept of atmosphere. It becomes, to some extent, compatible with scales other than that of the earth (see Likavčan 2019). There is a terrestrial atmosphere that defines the capacity for living (Calvillo 2023), and that is the object of a multitude of scientific and policy operations due to the changing balance of atmospheric gases. However, there are also other atmospheres within that terrestrial space. The atmosphere becomes a concept that can be cut, enclosed, and transported; it becomes nested in different sites of management, including the curatorial attention paid to the ephemeral but material force.

Sealed containers act as operative ontologies (Siegert 2017; Krämer 2017; Parikka 2023, 34–39) as they function as cultural techniques. Such techniques, including architectural ones, produce what are traditionally identified as ontological states (regarding, for example, space). Hence, this shifts the focus to such operators that divide and create spatial units as well as enact particular states of habitability and inhabitability. Here, the container functions in a double role as it pairs up the material differentiation of inside and outside with the seemingly ontological question of the invisibility of colorless gases. Trace elements such as smoke function as autographic visualization (Offenhuber 2023)—where the data is embodied in the phenomena it is a sign of—that is familiar from the history of media and science such as already mentioned Marey’s experiments (1899-1902). In other cases, alternative proxies are at play. As much as flickering leaves of a tree are a proxy of wind—a particular force and energetic event—glass containers bring about a further epistemic and aesthetic way of perceiving wind or air. The changes introduced into the air of the sphere by the breathing of an animal inside, for example, cannot be seen with the naked eye. It is the effects that these transformations produce in the beings and objects introduced inside that make it possible to induce that which has occurred beyond the visible. In this sense, these containers are related to vacuum chambers that were already a central element of seventeenth-century scientific apparatuses (Shapin and Schaffer 1985): they are experimental spaces, volumes in which to insert objects and give rise to the reconstruction of narratives, including cultural ones beyond the scientific account of facts (Baudot 2012).

The movement of branches and leaves caused by the wind that animates the body of the plant in the image has hardly any noticeable effect on the leaves isolated by the bubble. The plant, which in Priestley’s experiments made it possible to establish the idea of the atmosphere as a composition of gases in dynamic equilibrium, makes visible in these videos the separation of one atmosphere from another. From This Is a Picture of Wind, J. R. Carpenter’s (2020) creative writing and archive of images, the sphere pushes us to change the titular statement to: this is a picture of the erasure of wind. The relation to moving image is essential. In relation to these cuts in the atmosphere, the spheres act as a visual device in the videos. Such operative devices eventually introduce a question related to the image: to what extent is the image of the moving tree seen on a monitor also an atmosphere detached from a background of movement and mixture transformed into animation and color?

This question led to the second instance of the cut central to understanding the techniques of containment at play. Here we deal with the planetary rescaled as an image (and a model). In the installation, the videos of the trees are synchronized. But instead of synchronization based on playback time, the operation tries to match images of trees shaken by winds of equal intensity, as if a virtual wind of sorts were passing through the environment of images. Although the sphere in the images could be understood as a kind of wind sensor, there was no sensor or anemometer during the shooting of the videos. How can the videos be synchronized according to the wind intensity? The tree can provide an answer. With the help of computer vision algorithms for frame-by-frame motion quantification, the measurement of the tree’s movement can give us an estimate of the intensity of the wind speed.

This is, in fact, what happens in the videos in the installation. Importantly, no special software had to be programmed to obtain the calculations of the movement between frames. The vectors on the screen had already been computed beforehand. As part of the MPEG4 video codec specification, the video that contains the moving images of the tree also stores so-called motion vectors between frames. In other words, the vectors in the image do not come from an a posteriori calculation on top of the video but from a process of extraction of the information contained in the video file itself. The movement produced by the wind in the leaves of the trees finds in today’s most widespread codec a technological materialization of its own, algorithmically specified, as part of the image compression system.

This reallocation of wind is not anecdotal. In our earlier work (Gil-Fournier and Parikka 2024), we have found many similar episodes of transfer, such as the shift where the notion of ground truth is no longer specific to the surface of the ground as a geological or geographic reference point. Instead, it is read through the constantly evolving set of relations among environments of images increasingly populated by the complex of devices, infrastructures, and protocols in earth observation systems. That is, analytical knowledge about the world’s surfaces shifts to synthetic knowledge about the surface of images.

Taking this into account, the unexpected emergence of the otherwise invisible operations of the MPEG4 video codec goes beyond compression and optimization; the question about the measurement of wind does not only involve a shift to a calculation on the surface of images but brings to the foreground a layer of (synthetic wind) motion vectors operating in the environment of images. The synchronized videos speak not only about an erasure of wind inside the bubble of the image: by playing the videos at times of equal number of motion vectors, the images appear as if they are swayed by the same wind. A synthetic wind of sorts is reallocated in the software layer of the digital image. In a sense, the installation points to the fact that every digital video is somehow a picture of this synthetic wind, if we take the vector fields operating in the codec as a technical background designed for the fast circulation of images in the context of digital platforms, streamed content, and social media. This links the question about the material limitations and conditions of curatorial practice in relation to the planetary again with the nested containments we have addressed so far. As we will see next, images and imaging mechanisms—related to simulation and visualization of wind currents—can be understood as spatial enclosures open to artistic and curatorial renegotiations.

Indoor Wind

Could a tree and a sphere on a tripod be brought into the exhibition space? While the creation of architectures of contained air and related logistical apparatuses like the Wardian case for plant transport and the visual media of terraria implies at least some level of mobility (cf. Latour 1986), the more concrete curatorial idea was less easy to exhibit due to the infrastructural limitations of the white cube of gallery space. Nonetheless, during the artistic research and curatorial process, this was one of the ideas considered.^[6] This was a practical problem concerning how the exhibition unfolds as a negotiation of constraints that are one expression of the pragmatics of scaling much beyond a narrative or conceptual theme: what materials can be brought in, what materials can be temporarily contained in exhibition space. Such practicalities thus also represent one scale of addressing the locality of instruments and the narrative theme of planetarity, as technical and artistic images as well as architecture function as operative hinges and articulations of scalar mediations. In short, an exhibition is framed not only by artistic pieces but also by all sorts of other mediations like imaging and management of space.

We return to planetarity rescaled into a building. The exhibition hall of the Foundation Cerezales Antonino y Cinia has large windows on both the north and south facades. Being inside and observing the surrounding landscape recalls impressions and experiences noted more than a hundred years ago from inside greenhouses and other glass palaces: “As in a crystal, there no longer is any true interior or exterior. We have been separated from nature, but we hardly feel it. The barrier erected between us and the landscape is almost ethereal. If we imagine that air can be poured like a liquid, then it has, here, achieved a solid form after the removal of the mold into which it was poured. We find ourselves within a cut-out segment of atmosphere.”^[7] Such discursive notes on glass and architecture have been plentiful since the nineteenth century. In this gallery space, installing a sphere inside the room would present a way to recursively address the relationship of the room itself to its surroundings.

The proposal for a recursive relation that would problematize any interior and exterior relation of a landscape to the built environment would both enclose and highlight air (cf. Rahm 2023). However, central to the recursive method proposed, the idea would not function without an air current—that is, if the air in the exhibition space would stay still. Instead, the aim is to think of air as an active part of the artistic work instead of a mere backdrop. While air-conditioning has been a central part of the architectural context of the museum, artistic galleries, and exhibition spaces (on air-conditioning more broadly, see Barber 2020), as also pointed out in the classic Air-Conditioning Show (1966–67) by Art & Language (Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin), in this case the question was about how to make air move through the hall: how circulation and a circular current could be managed across the large space.

Figure 5:The main exhibition room.

Source: Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia.

Framed by the two large windows, the exhibition hall is a large space of five hundred square meters with a gabled roof that exceeds ten meters in height in some areas of the room. The total volume of air in the hall amounts to four thousand cubic meters, a considerable figure if we take into account that the total weight of this air under normal conditions of pressure and temperature is equivalent to five tons. In principle, though, introducing circulation through a specially designed ventilation system should not be too complicated. Similar systems exist inside large halls, such as those in greenhouses and industrial stables, which have specific fans to periodically renew the air in these facilities. Moreover, the foundation’s building is characterized by a highly efficient geothermal energy system. The building also includes airflow technologies that control the air circulation in the room to facilitate the distribution of heat and the vertical stratification of temperatures (Juan José Valderrey, climate engineer, personal communication, 2023).

The air currents created by these ventilation systems are barely noticeable. The movement of indoor air masses created by these extraction and regeneration systems involves velocities below the threshold of human perception. In an air-conditioned space, for example, we do not usually have the sensation that the air is moving or that there are currents of any kind. A different kind of fan is needed to create a perceptible circular current inside the room. The question was referred to an engineering department of one of the main manufacturers of fans and ventilation systems.^[8] Their answer was blunt: moving this volume of air would require two tubular fans of similar size as the ones used in large tunnels for road traffic. According to a computational fluid dynamics simulation provided by this department, two of these fans would be enough to put all the air in the room into motion in a circular current. In the vicinity of these fans, however, the air outlet velocity would be very high—up to twenty-five meters per second—and the sound of the installation, even with silencers, would be too disturbing for visitors.

Figure 6:Computational fluid dynamics simulation of the currents of air created by two tubular fans in the space of the Fundación Cerezales. Ground plan cut.

Courtesy of Soler & Palau. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 7:Computational fluid dynamics simulation of the currents of air created by two tubular fans in the space of the Fundación Cerezales. Elevation cut.

Courtesy of Soler & Palau. Reproduced with permission.

The result of the simulation of air dynamics presented the practical impossibility of an enhanced air current inside the exhibition space. It also showed the impossibility of creating an artificial wind for the installation that would have featured a living transported tree and the spherical shelter that came to be shown in the video works. However, besides this practical engineering angle, the simulation introduced a new type of image into the project, one that incorporated contemporary architectural, design, and engineering forms of wind management through software and code. Unlike the transparent spheres, the data visualization generated by the simulation provides a complete spatial overview of the movement of the air currents in the room. These images are reminiscent of those provided by weather forecasting, such as those used in locating windy geographical areas for the recording of the videos of the shaken trees with the spheres enclosing part of them. The two kinds of images presented counterpoints of visualization, though one related to data visualization with the use of computational fluid dynamics and spatial modeling, and the other, an artistic version of autographic visualization (Offenhuber 2023) where the tree registers in analogue computational form the movement of energy—wind—around and through it, where the leaves act as visualization proxies for meteorological data.

In the case of the simulation images, the detail and resolution of the vector field are such that the resulting image is reminiscent of meteorological wind maps of geographical spaces of a different scale. Given the impossibility of generating a circular current that runs perceptibly through the entire space of the room, would it be possible to generate a real-time image of the currents that run through the room, pushed by the bodies of the visitors and modeled by the architecture of the foundation’s space? Or, on a smaller scale, like the spheres attached to the trees in the videos, would it be possible to visualize the air currents inside them? In which ways can we continue the visualization and imaging in the artistic methods themselves? Which methods, even constructions, help to continue creating different scales of planetary wind and imaging apparatuses?

Schlieren Visualization of Airflow

Architectural and photographic framing of wind refers to historical forms of mediation that have emerged in the history of science and, indeed, the design of interior spaces for visualization of air currents. The famous images of wind as smoke and smoke as wind by Étienne-Jules Marey around 1899 are an early example of the emergence of the question of cultural techniques of (data) visualization.^[9] Similarly, other practices of microphotography of waves, such as Ernst Mach’s famous image, revealed wave patterns as a brass bullet traveled faster than sound. Since the late nineteenth century, cinematic and photographic experiments extended much beyond the representational context to encompass such abstract spheres of fluid patterns across different scales. As Sabine von Fischer (2017) has shown, the geometric studies of auditorium design in the early twentieth century featured image-based techniques that included the shadowgraphs of sound waves traveling inside architectural models of buildings. At the back of the history of mathematics of fluid dynamics, these image-based techniques encompassed multiscalar architectures (divisions and cuts of interiority and exteriority) that provided one form where the spatial arrangement and imaging practices functioned as analogue computation (cf. Batchen 2002). In short, air currents, waves, and wind have been articulated in ways that make them directly part of spatial and architectural discussions. Our interest in planetarity as architecture, models, and images implies, in the end, not three separate themes but how these aspects merge.

As part of the broader approach for the exhibition to create installation objects and apparatuses for environmental media, one point of interest focuses on the Schlieren system, first conceptualized in its modern form in the 1860s. Schlieren optics is a system of mirrors and lenses that give rise to still and moving images where airflow, thermal turbulences, or other movements of hot or cold air become visible either in grayscale or in color. The system implies one example of thermal (visual) media (Starosielski 2022), although, in its earlier historical context, it was used as an experimental apparatus for the visualization of air and sound waves, including in the design of interior architectures (von Fischer 2017). The Schlieren system is a cameraless apparatus, although a lens and a projection screen can be connected directly to the optical circuit for images to be formed in real time without any need for amplification or digital effect. It introduces another form of spatially enclosed imaging enclosed in space—not just enclosed air, but images and imaging mechanisms that can be negotiated in spatial terms.

Figure 8:Diagram of a Schlieren system based on lenses instead of mirrors.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, created by user JeanBizHertzberg. CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of the most striking features of these systems is their simplicity. A standard Schlieren system starts with a beam of light emitted by a spotlight. The beam enters the circuit after passing through a slit or a collimator to eliminate the rays that would escape it. It reaches a first parabolic mirror to continue as a beam of parallel rays. At this point, the beam crosses the observation zone. Here, it is necessary to generate disturbances that will become visible in the image at the end; for this, a hot or cold source is often needed (such as a hand or a candle). The beam is then reflected again in a parabolic mirror to converge the rays back to a minimum spot. And it is at this point that the crucial operation takes place. A flat, rigid surface, as thin as possible—usually a razor blade—gets in the way of the beam, blocking the passage of part of the light rays. This element transforms the information contained in the rays in such a way that once collected by a camera or projected on a screen, they can show the movements of the air as if these were objects with relief, illuminated from the side.

In view of this diagram and apparatus, the immediate question is how, by cutting off part of the light beam, the movement of the invisible air currents becomes visible. In order to understand this, it is necessary to look at what the heat source is doing in the observation area. Hot surfaces heat the nearest air by contact, and hot air mixes with air currents at room temperature. As the light rays pass through the area, they encounter a mixture of hot and cold air currents. These temperature differences mean different refractive indices for the rays of light. And just as a toothbrush seems to bend when introduced inside a glass of water, changes in the refractive index cause the light rays to change direction. In the Schlieren system, because of the position of the razor, the rays that are not deflected end up blocked by the razor before reaching the camera or the projection screen. Some of the deflected rays, on the other hand, manage to circumvent the cut to build the image.

For these cutoffs to work, it is essential in the observation area to host a space for fluctuations in the refractive index of the transparent medium. This is, in most cases, air or water. In fact, the name Schlieren comes from the German word used in the context of the glass industry to designate this space of impurities, where the word means streaks, striations, or cords (Jebsen-Marwedel 1960, 177). The apparatus then defines a space of Schlieren objects: gradient disturbances of heterogeneous transparent media and small refractive differences within the overall background that bend light rays. In the most common demonstrations of the technique, the refraction patterns result from temperature changes in other visible Schlieren objects, including pressure waves such as those of sound or mixtures of dissimilar materials (Settles 2001, 28). In this regard, Schlieren systems have been explored as a form of visual media poetically linked to the space of relationships between bodies and environments, as in the artistic research of Clements Winkler discussed in a conversation with Léa Perraudin and Iva Rešetar (Perraudin, Rešetar, and Winkler 2021).

The visualization of these perturbations in transparent media has been observed since the seventeenth century, after Robert Hooke’s experiments with shadowgraphs. However, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that this technique was articulated in the form we know it today, thanks to the work of physicists Léon Foucault and August Toepler, among others. Decades later, some of the most famous Schlieren images were created. In the 1880s, Viennese physicist Ernst Mach and his colleagues used the method to observe gunshots and thereby settle an argument about what actually happens when a bullet travels faster than sound. They saw shock waves trailing from a supersonic bullet like the water waves from a speedboat. Remarkably, instead of showing the turbulent movement of the gaseous air, a space of geometrically perfect lines and circles stood out against the background. While we could argue this to be the conception of a new kind of scientific image at a micro scale and beneath the perceptual threshold of humans (for example, see Hoffmann 2002 and Parikka 2010), it also presented the start of a new kind of architectural image: also of micro scale, but scalable to the design of acoustic waves across spaces, helping, in predigital terms, to visualize fluid dynamics (von Fischer 2017). The Schlieren system stood as a parallel track, at times closely resonating with the other way to execute an enclosed visualization of air currents and resistance: wind tunnels. Here, Marey’s wind tunnels were contemporaries of such work as that of Ludwig Mach, who also built custom apparatuses for the fabrication of air and wind to be photographed (Mannoni 2023, 121–23).

As is clear by now, scale is one of the guiding terms and practical ways of thinking about both the hall at Fundación Cerezales and the artistic pieces. This featured in many of the speculative questions early on: Would it be possible to build a Schlieren system that covers a space of the dimensions of a hall like the one in the Fundación Cerezales? Can the steady currents, turbulences, and air movements in the hall be projected on such a scale?

Figure 9:View of the Schlieren space installation.

Photograph by Juan Baraja. Courtesy of Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia.

Instead of trying to install a large-scale Schlieren system, a final installation presents several systems organized as a grid (figure 9). Supported by large bamboo poles, the various elements that make up this optical mechanism—mirror, spotlight, lens, and projection screen—interlock and construct a space in which visitors can wander. By moving between the different silk fabric screens to approach the images produced by these systems, the movement of the visitors’ bodies generates currents that these same systems visualize. As in a labyrinth of mirrors, however, the grid blurs the direct relationship between the visualized air currents (figure 10), the bodies, and the optical elements that generate them. They blend into the space.

Figure 10:Visualization of a current with a Schlieren system as part of the installation.

Photograph by Juan Baraja. Courtesy of Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia.

The material operations of knowledge produced in the exhibition are also closely related to the visitors. Knowledge is conceived as a body, where the body is fundamentally defined by its movement and the movement becomes understood as a fluid current. This entangling of knowing and movement also triggers the question: When we perceive, feel, or measure air, what other circulations are taking place?

The Extinction of a Wind: Conclusions

The different mechanisms of imaging and exhibiting visual cultures of air, energy, and heat are employed as instances of artistic research. This work includes the curatorial site as an extended site of testing and experimenting with the enclosures of insides and outsides. Generative artistic methods are employed as scalar devices that work upon the premise of the planetary. However, this is, on the one hand, a matter of working with planetary-scale phenomena within the bounds of exhibition space and, on the other, also problematizing the assumption that the planetary itself is of the scale of the planet. Instead, following the critical legacy of the term, it is less the smoothness of the globe as an idealized entity of projection and more akin to a fragmented, nonlinear space of disconnections and competing scales (Latour 2017). Differences abound. What the artistic works and the exhibition contribute to this discussion is to show the centrality of scale through experimental setups: the mix of optical devices with localized framing of weather, such as air and wind, work as an example of autographic visualization (Offenhuber 2023) while also contributing to the expanded methodological discussions concerning elemental media. The elemental is broken down into its constituent operations: air currents, chemical composition, software visualization, architectural enclosures, and more. The architectural theme that tracks the division of interior and exterior is one example where the operative ontologies staged through artistic and curatorial methods come to play a role in the discussion of so-called nature, or what Parikka (2015) coins as medianatures: the recursive feedback loops between media techniques of framing and mobilizing natural resources (and nature as a resource) where the natural dispositions—wind, energy, heat—act as affordances and platforms for mediation. This point speaks closely to Easterling’s point about medium design (2021)—that is, design that emerges from the inclusion of existing landscape affordances, mapping and using existing trajectories in subtle ways that also ideally do not reproduce modes and models of extractivism (on alternative cartographies beyond extractivism, see Aït-Touati, Arènes, and Grégoire 2022). The centrality of the image—where the image is simultaneously expanded beyond the confines of traditional artistic imagery to encompass a series of wind and air images from the architecture of framing spheres as an optical device for air-conditioning to simulations of fluid dynamics to the Schlieren system of imaging diffractive waves—holds together different components of Gil-Fournier’s way of building a research-led artistic exhibition that also includes the curatorial space as an active narrative and material agent. The pieces come to reflect the space as much as the space enables the existence of the artistic works, including the limitations discussed above as part of the processual nature of the work. Not just wind, but images and enclosures of wind become space-generating.

One of the most notable recent developments in the area around the foundation was the construction of a large reservoir at the top of the valley, Embalse del Porma (Porma Reservoir). Beyond the controversy surrounding this large infrastructure project, the transformation of the landscape included a change in the local climate. According to the local inhabitants, after the reservoir was built, the average temperature in the area dropped so much that the continuous frosts prevented the cultivation of crops such as fruit trees. In this sense, the work on winds in the exhibition revolves around a speculative question. What if, as part of the changes to local weather caused by the dam, a local wind were to disappear? Every territory has its usual winds, often differentiated by a name (eolionimy names this practice of naming). The disappearance of a wind implies a system of recognition of such air currents. On what kind of scale does such knowledge operate? It is not that of the meteorological grids (Moro 2020), for which the size of these kinds of valleys is smaller than their standard resolution. Nor is it the scale of airflow visualization systems such as Schlieren optics. The scale of a territory of these characteristics corresponds to the geographical scope of its inhabitants’ tacit knowledge and networks of devices linked to this knowledge, such as the weather vanes on the towers of the main buildings in the valley. What kind of proxies or media signal the extinction of a wind? What kind of operative devices of scale comprise a valley, an area with its own microclimate? What kind of planetarity signals both contexts, that of the event and this scale?

In the exhibition, the disappearance of a fictitious wind is featured in the third act, A Wind Called Rogante. The name Rogante alludes to the name of the lost animal called by the shepherd in the sound installation of the second act. As the horizon rises, we not only call out to lost animals and species but also record and catalogue movements of the air and ocean currents that will never be repeated systematically. This works against the traditional early modern idea of empiricism, which also informs contemporary climate thinking that also has to face its own paradox: models created based on historical patterns might prove to be inadequate as the increasing amount of extreme weather—or otherwise changed weather like alternative temperature patterns or disappearing winds—puts into question any normal statistical distribution that had been accurate for earlier centuries. The primacy of the anomalous, extreme, or even anecdotal (Cubitt 2020) is used as a methodological cue to investigate such instances of mediation.

In this case, recording winds that stop blowing in different areas of the planet is not an exercise in nostalgia. To understand any landscape is also to understand its winds as one of the many material and energetic currents that shape it. A related theme features in the different artistic method of Victor Mazón, whose work Vortex: Actions for a body in movement (2023) involves recordings from wind turbines and the landscapes where the blowing wind meshed. The piece investigates both the sonic transformation of such valleys and the creation of new sonic landscapes that never existed before the wind energy infrastructures were built (Mazón and Parikka 2024). The planetary-scale green transition can thus be investigated with artistic methods focused on how past and future winds define and create space. Collecting records of vanished winds speaks of the planetary as a space to face the new—whether for survival or economic exploitation—and perceiving the dynamics of design materialized in the planet itself. Here, the question of extinction is closely related to enclosure and extraction, the fundamental political, financial, and architectural force at play in the Anthropocene commons (to echo Cubitt 2021). The disappearance and the capture go hand in hand, as “the labour of capturing the free gift of light and natural processes” (Cubitt 2021, 37), such as wind, comes to feature as a central element in this aesthetics of the planetary.

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of the text was supported by the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as part of the Schlieren Space project and the Institutional Support Fund for long-term conceptual development of research organizations, provided by the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Czech Republic (2022–2023). In addition, it was supported by the AHRC/DFG-funded project Weather Reports: Wind as Media, Model, Experience (2022–2024) as well as the Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data project (AUFF, 2022–2024).

We are grateful to Elise Misao Hunchuck for her assistance in copyediting the language of the article. We also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback.