the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true — environments are media. the atmospheric envelope holds a latent image of our industrial civilisation and technological culture: did the sky change colors? do clouds have different shapes? are the seasonal movements of bird migration shifting? a matter of concern for scientists, this is an issue we can also address in the context of aesthetics. at the same time, media have peculiar materialities: different textures and grains followed one another; paper and films aged and continued to react to humidity, temperature, light.

for “media atmosphere: taipei”, we dug into collections of images – institutional and amateur films, prints, and digital files – to uncover records of past ambiances: fragments of skies, clouds, rain, mist, sunsets, smoke. we excavated the background, the periphery of the image.

we can look closely at the information in the background, bringing it to the foreground. through a spatial installation that offers materiality to a generative flow of video and audio, we aim to build an atmospheric image, a collective memoir, made of absences, voids, past and present, recorded by multiple hands, across taipei, tightly interwoven.

through the engagement of local inhabitants, visitors, as well as scientists and engineers – the latter visible in the images of cloud seeding and climate control contributed by the taiwanese water resources agency – the question of breathing freely emerged at the same time as a metaphor for freedom and as the literal reality of living through climate change.