The aim of this paper is to propose an approach—structural, conceptual, and aesthetic—that radically departs from the pre vailing obsession with content and genre. Instead, it explores alternative pathways drawn from research and artistic practices at the periphery of vision: a descent into the purgatorial waiting rooms of the unspoken, the out-of-focus, the off-screen. The attempt is to extend the gaze beyond objective visibility, in the hope of uncovering new vitality in artistic thought and practice. Or, rephrasing the title of this writing, to re instate excitement and attraction towards what is secret, subliminal, enshrouded in the haze of latency.
This paper explores the concept of Environmental therapy through a dialogue between philosophical perspectives, artistic practices, and speculative approaches to care. Expanding beyond the human subject, Environmental therapy considers the environment itself as an active participant in processes of transformation, bearing memory, trauma, and agency. Drawing from new materialist theories, hauntology, and affect studies (Barad, Ingold, Bennett, Haraway, Gordon), the research examines how artistic interventions engage with wounded landscapes, abandoned sites, and repressed histories, addressing their psychic residues and perceptual imprints. Through a selection of contemporary art case studies, including the Don’t Follow the Wind exhibition in Fukushima’s exclusion zone, olfactory and atmospheric projects (Tolaas, Assaël), and choreographic explorations by La Tierce or El Conde de Torrefiel, the paper investigates artistic methodologies that activate latent memories and generate reciprocal processes of care between humans and environments. Finally, the paper critically examines the ethical challenges of such approaches, questioning the risks of romanticization, anthropomorphism, and extractive aesthetics. By framing environmental therapy as a hybrid and relational practice, this study suggests that artistic and performative interventions might foster new ways of sensing, remembering, and co-inhabiting fragile ecologies.
This essay navigates the intersection of artistic research and elemental media, adopting the epistemology of “Weatherscapes” as a basis for exploring the parallels in the terminology of uncertainty, transparency, and control shared by data and meteorology. It reflects on the shifts in scale from digital bits to atoms in processes of ontology, employing metaphors such as clouds and turbulence to interrogate the epistemological dimensions of digital knowledge. Weatherscaping emerges as an epistemological and speculative framework for processing the experiential nature of fragment ed knowledge that defines human terrestrial existence living on a planet enveloped by its atmosphere. Between Bits and Atoms, the Atlas is an investigation of the relationship between human beings, data and weather, weaving together the individual with the global, questioning the jump of scales and the invisible layers that intrinsically entangle us with the surrounding matter(s) in time of layered crisis. The scope is introducing Weatherscaping Epistemology: a shift from being in the weather to be a weather being.
Shanghai’s urban landscape reveals a com plex interplay between material transformation and sensory perception. This study explores how the notion of atmosphere— understood as a dynamic configuration of material, social, and emotional elements— can serve as a lens for interpreting con temporary urban experience. Through theoretical references to Zumthor, Böhme, Pallasmaa, and Griffero, the paper situates atmosphere as both a perceptual and cultural phenomenon. The methodology is articulated through five analytical frames— Atmospheres of Ascent, Atmospheres in Fading, Atmospheres in Transition, The City of Toys, and The Play of Shadows—each addressing a specific condition of Shanghai’s evolving urban fabric. Writing, photography, and video are employed as analytical tools to capture ephemeral transitions between public and private, physical and digital, collective and individual realms. The results reveal how urban atmospheres embody both continuity and change, mediating between memory and innovation. Ultimately, the research suggests that atmosphere can act as a bridge between perception and design, offering new perspectives on how to inhabit, document, and reimagine the contemporary city.
This paper presents an experimental reflection on the immaterial field generated by proximity, interaction, and shared affective tension. Rather than developing a conventional academic argument, the text performs its own object of inquiry: the unstable space that emerges between subjects when an inter relation takes place. Through the recurring figure of the loom, the essay describes this space as an intangible yet operative realm, made of tensions, threads, rhythms, and non-defining forces that cannot be fully grasped while they are active. The proposed “machinism of proximities” is therefore understood as a temporary and self-consuming structure: it arises from material encounters, operates through affective and subjective forces, and dis appears when one attempts to define or experience it cognitively. By combining po etic language, speculative reasoning, and self-referential form, the article questions the possibility of describing immaterial relations without reducing their atmospheric and affective complexity.
In the first part, the text describes some significant episodes related to the representation of clouds in the history of West ern painting, particularly in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, highlighting a relation to theatrical representations of sacred scenes belonging to the medieval period. What is most important are the symbolic aspects linked to this atmospheric element, often related to its mystical role. Mention is made of the function assumed by the representation of clouds in tradition al Sino-Nipponese painting, in this context the characteristics of mutability and vague ness explain their use. But the cloud is also an element that enchants the observer and is therefore employed by contemporary artists in their installations for unexpected performances, where the cloud itself is the protagonist. The second part of the article is dedicated to the relationship between data collected by laser scanners (point clouds) and their use as representation tools, beyond metric information. The rendered images of these data highlight artis tic values in the field of digital art.
This paper explores the evolving concept of atmosphere in contemporary aesthetics, emphasizing its influence on images and visual representations. Traditionally seen as mere reproductions of reality, images are now recognized for their capacity to evoke atmospheres that shape perceptions and emotions. Drawing on the phenomenological theories of Hermann Schmitz, Gernot Böhme, and Tonino Griffero, the study redefines atmospheres as ‘quasi-cosal’ entities that exist between the subject and environment. Unlike static objects, atmospheres are fluid, multisensory, and affectively charged, influencing human experience holistically. The research also examines the role of images as ‘generators of atmospheres’, high lighting their performative power beyond representation. ‘Phenomenographies’ are proposed as innovative tools for capturing the ephemeral nature of atmospheres, bridging subjective experience and visual communication. This perspective challenges conventional distinctions between subject and object, offering new interpretative horizons in architecture, visual arts, and aesthetics. By recognizing the affective and sensory dimensions of atmospheres, the paper invites a re-evaluation of contemporary experiences, enhancing emotional engagement and deepening our understanding of lived spaces.
Atmospheres, intangible yet perceptible dimensions of spaces, profoundly influence human experience. This article explores how atmospheres can be consciously captured through sensory approaches and translated into tangible experiences using methodologies that combine sensory games, poetic narratives, performances, walks. This approach impacts educational and participatory practices. Case studies: lectures, co design workshops, and sensory concerts demonstrate how sensory practices foster deeper connections between individuals and their environments, transforming spaces into emotionally resonant places, i.e., atmospheres. Contributions from diverse disciplines, such as architecture, philosophy, communication, and the performing arts, provide a multidimensional understanding of atmospheres and the associated feelings. The findings highlight the potential of these approaches to inform inclusive practices, offering innovative tools for pedagogy and de sign of participation.
This paper examines how sound structures and transforms the experiential conditions of video game worlds, foregrounding the dynamic relations that arise between auditory phenomena and the environments in which they unfold. Through an analysis of Rain World (Videocult, 2017) and Silent Hill (Konami, 1999), it argues that sound functions as an active agent linking player, avatar, and world. Departing from the objectifying tendencies of traditional sound scape theory, the paper draws on ecological and embodied perspectives to propose an analysis in which perception emerges through continuous interaction among sensory, cognitive, and material dimensions. In this view, sound is not merely representational but constitutive of the player’s experience, shaping the agencies that define virtual worlds. Through concepts such as embodiment, kynesonic syncresis, and transdiegesis, the investigation reveals how game environments decentralize hu man subjectivity, situating the player within complex networks of interdependence. By engaging with the phenomenology of listening and the porous boundaries between diegetic and extradiegetic spaces, the paper argues for an understanding of virtual soundscapes as dynamic ecologies where meaning arises from complexity. Ultimately, it advances a holistic framework that situates sound as a central mode of world-making, one that reconfigures and problematizes the ontology of the game-world and invites a broader reflection on the entangled nature of perception, agency, and environment in digital media.
The desire to seal skies within confined spaces crosses disciplines and ages. From food packaging to planetary climate engineering through poetry and painting, atmosphere is continuously portrayed in recur rent simulations reminiscent of a Russian Doll structure. Structuring the notion of “planetary packaging” as an interpretative paradigm—and growing around it—this text depicts atmospheres across opposite —but mirroring— scales and contexts. In a system of echoes and reflections, contained atmospheres and atmospheric containers blur and shape each other. By counter posing modified atmosphere packaging —provocatively landscapes of built worlds gazing toward planetary processes— with climate engineering strategies —systematically reminiscent of procedures employed in modified atmosphere packaging— the research bridges tension between planetary non-linear and complex mechanisms, and the everyday immediate-reachable dimension. Tracing but modeling and speculating its attributes, the smaller atmospheric doll can observe and imitate the largest, while the latter drawing on the smaller omits fundamental elements, offering a reductive, simplified human-graspable understanding of it.
This essay examines Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Lina Bo Bardi–A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) as an atmospheric encounter between moving images, architecture, and the cultural imagination of public space. Through Julien’s cinematic traversal of Bo Bardi’s buildings in São Paulo and Salvador, the article explores how montage, screen arrangement, choreography, and the use of elemental agents produce a relational environment. Particular attention is given to MASP’s open museographic dispositif and exhibition design, the SESC Pompéia’s bridges and apertures, and Bo Bardi’s eco logical thinking of air, ventilation, and collective inhabitation. The installation is read as a filmic architecture in which the material and social energies of Bo Bardi’s work are reanimated through projection, rhythm, and spatial passage. By linking atmosphere, spectatorship, and environmental media, the es say argues that Julien’s work constructs a moving, breathable form of architectural memory and public culture.
This paper analyses the role of atmospheric representation in architecture, focusing in particular on the use of collage as an expressive tool to evoke the emotional and immaterial dimension of environments. Beginning with a theoretical reflection on architectural atmospheres and their perceptual construction, the paper explores how various architects and designers have utilised collage to represent spaces and experiences. Through historical and contemporary case studies, this study highlights how collage can transcend the limitations of photorealistic rendering, enabling greater expressive and imaginative freedom. Furthermore, the paper presents two educational experiences conducted at ESAD in Matosinhos and the University of Palermo, where collage was employed as a tool to foster students’ critical awareness of the atmospheric quality of de signed spaces. The outcomes demonstrate that the visual representation of architectural atmospheres not only enriches the creative process but also translates the emotional experience of inhabiting into visual images. Collage is thus identified as a pivotal instrument in the design and communication of contemporary architecture.
This introductory paper proposes a shift from the image as object to imaging as act, approaching atmosphere as a condition that emerges through processes of mediation. Drawing from medical imaging technologies, imaging is understood here as a di agnostic operation: a probing mechanism that renders internal, otherwise inaccessible processes visually representable. Within this framework, atmosphere operates as a relational field that, like the interior of the body, resists direct observation and becomes legible only through its effects, symptoms, and dispersions. Here, the neurological condition of blindsight offers a critical lens, revealing a mode of perception in which something is registered without entering conscious recognition, complicating the assumption that visibility coincides with knowledge. Within this framework, the olfactory realm emerges as a crucial model: operating through proximity, affect, and involuntary recognition, it dissolves the separation between subject and environment, offering an alternative mode of imaging grounded not in capture, but in attunement. Atmospheric imaging thus unfolds at the limits of visibility, where perception exceeds recognition. Engaging with authors like James Hillman, Paul Virilio and Luce Irigaray among others, the text situates atmosphere as a field of subliminal emergence.
The concept of atmosphere extends beyond its physical definition as a «gaseous envelope surrounding the Earth», encompassing a broader sensory and emotional dimension. Drawing on the work of Gernot Böhme, Tonino Griffero and Peter Zumthor, this article explores how architecture, through spatial composition and material choices, functions as a medium for generating specific atmospheres. Carlo Mollino’s interior design serves as a compelling case study, particularly his Bedroom for a Farmhouse in a Rice Field (1943), conceived for “Domus”. This project exemplifies how Mollino integrated layers of materials, colors, and spatial elements to create an immersive, protective environment. Through archival analysis and a qualitative approach, this study investigates the interplay between materiality, perception, and enclosure, highlighting Mollino’s commitment to designing spaces that are not only evocative but also feasible. The article contributes to the discourse on atmosphere in architectural interiors, demonstrating how Mollino’s design strategies transform space into a sensory and narrative experience.
In this paper I explore the connections between reveries and atmospheres by considering three images related to smell and memories that are interspersed in Gaston Bachelard’s works. I define them osmospheric images, indicating the causes and the effects of a peculiar disposition of day dreaming in tune with the irradiances that provide spaces and reminiscences with their flavor. My idea is that osmospheric images are the peculiar offsprings of reveries when imagination and memory are intertwined. Firstly, the odor of water mint will help unravel reveries and atmospheres. Secondly, through the smell of raisins, the osmospheric perceptual disposition, as well as the workings of imagination and memory, will be scrutinized. Finally, the fragrance of warm bread will allow to address memory and happiness, the bonheur of images that Bachelard achieves by daydreaming about his childhood and native home.
In a time when digital environments have increasingly become abstract and disconnected, we are seeing a resurgence of natural and bucolic imagery to describe, design, and engage with the Web. These metaphors go beyond simple rhetorical devices; they represent earnest efforts to redefine the atmosphere of our digital experiences, pushing back against the sterile functionalism that characterized the early decades of digital design. By critically examining the vibrant movement of digital humanities, this essay aims to trace the origins and potential developments of new aesthetics in digital design. Concepts like Deleuze’s Rhizome, Dark Forest theory, Digital Gardens, and Solar punk aesthetics emerge as reflections of a design ethos that seeks to reintegrate sensory, temporal, and ecological elements into spaces typically perceived as solely visual and mediated.
This paper investigates how images can evoke and represent atmospheres, moving beyond traditional aesthetic concerns with beauty in art to consider perception, experience, and environmental interaction in a world which is mostly designed. Drawing on contemporary philosophy, particularly the work of Böhme and Seel, it frames atmospheres as phenomena arising between a be holder and their environment, experienced individually and shared intersubjectively. Through a practice-led image research methodology, the study analyses series of experimental image variations – ranging from photorealistic 3D renderings of a scene to highly abstracted compositions – to examine how visual elements such as composition, color, light, perspective, and materiality contribute to atmospheric effects. The findings highlight the capacity of aesthetic practice to make implicit sensory knowledge explicit, offering a deeper understanding of how images shape emotional and perceptual experiences.
From the Latin word ‘tempus’, comes the term ‘temperare’, which means to mix. This gives us words related to weather such as ‘temperature’, but also expressions related to human affections like ‘temperament’. By looking at the etymological composition of these words, we will look at the practices of two contemporary artists: Teresa Margolles and Maria José Arjona. Thus, to observe how time, weather, temperature, temperament can be experienced in a single flux and create new areas of intersection between fields otherwise considered far apart. By bringing in some theories from Performance Studies, Neo-Materialist Theories, and Haptic Studies, we will look at the space-time generated by artistic practices –with a corporeal and performative background– to observe how matter, even the invisible one, constitutes memory and remembrance. The visual installation Aire (2003) by Teresa Margolles explores the invisibility of transtemporal traces, while the process-oriented work The White Series (2008) by Maria José Arjona investigates the visibility of material traces on the scene. These are two antithetical works that share a common interest on memory and cicatrix of time, grasping its atmospheric materiality. It is about feeling materially what circulates in the atmosphere and makes us fall into other temporalities.
Bulle Cybernétique is an artistic project conceived by Elena Giulia Abbiatici and developed with the professional nose Diletta Tonatto, that explores cybernetic war fare through olfactory language as both an aesthetic and political tool. It explores the use of the olfactory code as an unconventional means of communication capable of circumventing government restrictions and media censorship. Considering essences as a multidimensional medium, olfactory stimuli challenge traditional methods of information transmission, assuming a crucial role in the processes of encoding and decoding messages. Through an interdisciplinary approach that interweaves art, cybersecurity and geopolitics, the paper analyses three key dimensions of the project: 1) the need for new communicative codes that, involving little-explored senses, overcome transnational barriers and digital surveillance; 2) the relationship between digital attacks and chemical-bacteriological strategies; 3) the impact of submarine network infra structures on ecosystems.
This introductory essay argues that we may be witnessing the emergence of an “atmospheric turn,” part of a broader epistemological shift in the ways we perceive, represent, and design the world. Moving beyond the visual bias that has long shaped architecture and other image-based disciplines, it proposes a more embodied and multisensory perspective, in which atmospheres are understood in relation to situated and affective phenomena. Drawing on theories of affect and interaction, as well as on the fundamental contributions of sound studies, the essay emphasizes how sensory experience arises from the interplay of environments, bodies, memories, and more-than-human agencies. Within this framework, drawing, imaging, and surveying are reconsidered as practices that can engage with dimensions exceeding vision alone, including sound, smell, touch, and climatic conditions. The text therefore highlights both the limits and the potential of conventional representation, calling for the development of new strategies to represent atmospheric qualities by integrating subjective, embodied, and aesthetic forms of knowledge with analytical and data-driven methods.
