Animate Atmospheres: Art at the Edge of Materiality

Scheer observes an important new direction in contemporary art as an exploration of vital matter enabled through technological means; that is, the manufacture of atmospheres as entities in themselves rather than aesthetic by-products. Accordingly, cloud and fog formations produced by artists such as Axel Antas and Kris Verdonck reclaim the vaporous and film like phenomena that, in turn, echo historical ideas of atmospheric animism. With reference to writers such as Kathleen Stewart and Peter Sloterdjk, Scheer emphasizes the eco-politics at stake in these artworks that exemplify the production of ways of seeing that have real significance for how we live into the future, as life and politics become the art of the atmospherically possible.