visual artist and practise based researcher Husberg Hanna ja työryhmä

Atmospheric imaginaries: infrastructures, biopoetics and politics of Arctic phenomena

‘Atmospheric imaginaries’ looks at some of the large-scale techno-scientific infrastructures that allow sensing atmospheric phenomena, such as Aurora borealis, and explores how researching this visible phenomenon has opened up discoveries of invisible processes. Asking how one can study and apprehend phenomena and processes that cannot readily be seen or sensed, and which to a certain degree, might even be deliberately hidden and suppressed, the project engages with the poetics and politics of “visibility” and “perceptibility”. Inquiring into the roles science, technology and infrastructure play in the construction of environmental and atmospheric imaginaries, it further asks, what the implications of the increasingly complex and datafied versions of atmospheric models, vis à vis citizen involvement in discussions about our common concern, and care, of the atmosphere, our essential ‘life support’ are? And, how can we care for what is inaccessible to direct experience, but still structures our daily lives, for example through the use of satellites used for communication and navigation? The Saari Residency would be used to process material (photography, video and sound recordings and interviews) jointly collected at the EISCAT radio-technological sites situated in the Fenno-Scandinavian Arctic (2018-19), and to, combining text and audio-visual material, develop an experimental essay that explores different technoscientific modes of visualising the environment.