Aerocene Albedo, 2018
Photo: Courtesy the artist | Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
Collection
Aeroflector, solar cover, solar base, solar pot
Dimensions variable
The Aerocene is a project which works actively towards imagining and making possible a new epoch, recognising the emergency engendered by the effects of its antecedent: the Anthropocene. It can be viewed both as a multi-disciplinary practice, which produces published materials, forms of social and technical sculpture, and interactive installation and performance, and as an active nonprofit organisation which contributes research, data and material knowledge to fields dedicated to cultivating sustainable energy. Complete with its own manifesto, the Aerocene also provides the tools required for participants to activate those written principles themselves, enabling them to engage in Saraceno’s collective project. Aerocene Albedo is one of those tools. It consists of a mirrored umbrella called an Aeroreflector which, “when arranged [with others of its kind] in concentric circles, Saraceno imagines that in the manner of a solar-thermal power plant… might even concentrate enough heat to inflate a large balloon.”[1] His return to elemental sources of renewable energy demonstrates the artist’s commitment to reducing the impact of human activity upon the earth’s climate, a commitment which lies at the core of his project, but also has historical and political precedents in 18th century developments in hot-air-travel. Grant Johnson has noted the correlation between these advancements and the growing understanding of the individual as an active agent in early modern European thought as representing for Saraceno a significant shift in conceptions of human autonomy.[2] He writes that Saraceno’s Aerocene, along with its tools and habitable structures, “draws vitality from the dawn of ballooning in France, which he understands as the advent of a new set of possibilities for mankind's physical relationship to its surroundings; a situation that yielded new political concepts and helped spark the French Revolution.” However, by combining his research in those breakthroughs with his interest in various forms of utopian experimentation which took place in the second half of the twentieth century, in radical architecture firms such as Superstudio and Archizoom Associati as well as by visionaries like Buckminster Fuller, he precisely reverses the logic of the Enlightenment by suggesting that “folly might save us from reason.”[3]
Indeed it is by virtue of the same deep optimism and refutation of strictly rational logic which undergirded those projects that Saraceno manages to pose important questions concerning our current relationship to the planet. Further, the materials from which works like Aerocene Albedo are made help to open those questions up to democratic discussion and engagement by resisting high-cost, high-tech construction. By adapting the well-known D-I-Y logic, which denies the importance of professional expertise as a prerequisite for manufacture, to the collective alternative D-I-T (Do-It-Together), Saraceno’s tools demonstrate a belief in the democratisation of knowledge and skill which characterised the Age of Enlightenment to which Johnson refers, whilst also fostering a preference for collaboration. As Eva Díaz notes, by “[inventing] D-I-Y tools to actually physically access the stratosphere… Saraceno tests the capacity of individuals to lift off the Earth without the institutional apparatuses of once-dominant nation-based programs or the immense private wealth of tech oligarchs’ current space enterprises.” The aesthetics of precarity which accompanies these methods and materials simultaneously reflects the inherent fallibility of utopian plans, the kinds of nomadic citizenship entailed by a borderless future, and the earthly anxieties which exist around questions of sustainability, irreversible climate-change, and extinction. So, Saraceno’s project contains the classic admixture of idealism and impossibility. Just like those who preceded him, however, it is the offspring of his grand vision of an Aerocene which can be viewed as not-so-micro successes, even where the totality of the project remains unrealised: these include his contributions to “climate activism and pollution monitoring.”[4] Thus, as Eva Díaz continues, “like Fuller, Saraceno believes that a synthesis of humble advocate prototypes and grand visions can generate concrete data for future experimental models.”[5] The conjectural nature of his project, including works such as Aerocene Albedo, therefore does result in practical outcomes, one of which can be viewed as the production of a spatial commons, with spacial possibilities. — Elsa Gray
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24031992-700-art-why-tomas-saraceno-is-floating-on-air/
[2] Grant Johnson, “Tomás Saraceno: Minneapolis,” Art Papers, November 2009, Vol 33.6, 62.
[3] ibid.
[4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24031992-700-art-why-tomas-saraceno-is-floating-on-air/
[5] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/91/197883/we-are-all-aliens/
Dimensions variable
The Aerocene is a project which works actively towards imagining and making possible a new epoch, recognising the emergency engendered by the effects of its antecedent: the Anthropocene. It can be viewed both as a multi-disciplinary practice, which produces published materials, forms of social and technical sculpture, and interactive installation and performance, and as an active nonprofit organisation which contributes research, data and material knowledge to fields dedicated to cultivating sustainable energy. Complete with its own manifesto, the Aerocene also provides the tools required for participants to activate those written principles themselves, enabling them to engage in Saraceno’s collective project. Aerocene Albedo is one of those tools. It consists of a mirrored umbrella called an Aeroreflector which, “when arranged [with others of its kind] in concentric circles, Saraceno imagines that in the manner of a solar-thermal power plant… might even concentrate enough heat to inflate a large balloon.”[1] His return to elemental sources of renewable energy demonstrates the artist’s commitment to reducing the impact of human activity upon the earth’s climate, a commitment which lies at the core of his project, but also has historical and political precedents in 18th century developments in hot-air-travel. Grant Johnson has noted the correlation between these advancements and the growing understanding of the individual as an active agent in early modern European thought as representing for Saraceno a significant shift in conceptions of human autonomy.[2] He writes that Saraceno’s Aerocene, along with its tools and habitable structures, “draws vitality from the dawn of ballooning in France, which he understands as the advent of a new set of possibilities for mankind's physical relationship to its surroundings; a situation that yielded new political concepts and helped spark the French Revolution.” However, by combining his research in those breakthroughs with his interest in various forms of utopian experimentation which took place in the second half of the twentieth century, in radical architecture firms such as Superstudio and Archizoom Associati as well as by visionaries like Buckminster Fuller, he precisely reverses the logic of the Enlightenment by suggesting that “folly might save us from reason.”[3]
Indeed it is by virtue of the same deep optimism and refutation of strictly rational logic which undergirded those projects that Saraceno manages to pose important questions concerning our current relationship to the planet. Further, the materials from which works like Aerocene Albedo are made help to open those questions up to democratic discussion and engagement by resisting high-cost, high-tech construction. By adapting the well-known D-I-Y logic, which denies the importance of professional expertise as a prerequisite for manufacture, to the collective alternative D-I-T (Do-It-Together), Saraceno’s tools demonstrate a belief in the democratisation of knowledge and skill which characterised the Age of Enlightenment to which Johnson refers, whilst also fostering a preference for collaboration. As Eva Díaz notes, by “[inventing] D-I-Y tools to actually physically access the stratosphere… Saraceno tests the capacity of individuals to lift off the Earth without the institutional apparatuses of once-dominant nation-based programs or the immense private wealth of tech oligarchs’ current space enterprises.” The aesthetics of precarity which accompanies these methods and materials simultaneously reflects the inherent fallibility of utopian plans, the kinds of nomadic citizenship entailed by a borderless future, and the earthly anxieties which exist around questions of sustainability, irreversible climate-change, and extinction. So, Saraceno’s project contains the classic admixture of idealism and impossibility. Just like those who preceded him, however, it is the offspring of his grand vision of an Aerocene which can be viewed as not-so-micro successes, even where the totality of the project remains unrealised: these include his contributions to “climate activism and pollution monitoring.”[4] Thus, as Eva Díaz continues, “like Fuller, Saraceno believes that a synthesis of humble advocate prototypes and grand visions can generate concrete data for future experimental models.”[5] The conjectural nature of his project, including works such as Aerocene Albedo, therefore does result in practical outcomes, one of which can be viewed as the production of a spatial commons, with spacial possibilities. — Elsa Gray
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24031992-700-art-why-tomas-saraceno-is-floating-on-air/
[2] Grant Johnson, “Tomás Saraceno: Minneapolis,” Art Papers, November 2009, Vol 33.6, 62.
[3] ibid.
[4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24031992-700-art-why-tomas-saraceno-is-floating-on-air/
[5] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/91/197883/we-are-all-aliens/
Tomás Saraceno (San Miguel de Tucumán, 1973) is an Argentinian contemporary artist. He is best known for his large-scale, interactive installations and floating sculptures, and for his interdisciplinary approach to art. His work explores new, sustainable ways of sensing and inhabiting the environment, the result of research into the origins of the observable universe, arachnology and the potential future for airborne dwelling.
Saraceno launched the Aerocene in 2015; an open-source, community project for artistic and scientific exploration of environmental issues. Saraceno is the first person to have scanned, reconstructed and re-imagined spiders' woven spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection in existence.
This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.
Saraceno launched the Aerocene in 2015; an open-source, community project for artistic and scientific exploration of environmental issues. Saraceno is the first person to have scanned, reconstructed and re-imagined spiders' woven spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection in existence.
This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.