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In this commentary, I suggest Ash’s contributions can be productively illuminated if we consider his illustration of the forms of bump stocks through the lens of critical forensics. Examining the logic, perspective and spatialization of Ash’s flat ontological analysis, and considering resonances in open forensic investigations, I outline further consequences and stakes of this project.

In this commentary, I explore Peters and Steinberg’s use of extension, entanglement and excess as operative terms for their ‘more-than-wet’ ontology. I ask whether the elemental ocean so vividly expressed in their article is commensurable with these terms. In doing so, I suggest that elemental geographies may require further experimentation beyond analytical and grammatical description, and towards poetic, aesthetic and creative gestures that convey the force and complexity of the elements.

This article employs Anne Sauvagnargues’ writing on ‘artmachines’ to explore a series of experiments with spiders and simulations at Studio Tomas Saraceno. These experiments were the first to ‘capt...

The elements have become the focus of a significant volume of research by geographers and others. Engagements with the elements have been framed in terms of four elemental orientations: matter, molecule, milieu and media. Our aim is to consider what is at stake in efforts to think with, across and beyond these orientations. Avoiding any reduction of the elements to a single ontological or epistemological proposition, we explore possibilities for grasping their implication in the composition and decomposition of worlds. Doing this can be facilitated by thinking about these worlds in relation to three interrelated matters of concern: specificities, exposures and alchemies.

Asbtract This article engages with a series of artistic and collective experiments in floating to explore how emotion is affected by, caught up in, and otherwise choreographed by the meteorological atmosphere. Floating is understood in a dual sense: as the achievement of buoyancy in the medium of air, and as the social-affective cohesion and endurance of a collective. The primary contribution of this article is to develop an attention to the meteorology of affect and emotion by highlighting impressions, traces and sensual registers implicated in breathable airspaces, aeolian movements and thermodynamic relations between air and Sun. I do so by employing Sara Ahmed's social model of emotions and telling stories of the free-floating practices of the Aerocene Community. This article demonstrates how an attention to floating as both aerostatic movement and social-affective state can foreground relations between the airy and affective, reworking and reimagining the meteorological in studies of atmosphere.

A spider’s web is the species-specific production of spacetime; it is an aesthetic as well as an evolutionary, metabolic and climatic achievement. As part of a long-term engagement with spiders and their webs, the artist Tomás Saraceno has collaborated with populations of spiders and other creatures to produce hybrid webs. The processual and patterned production of hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno inspires thought on the axes of more-than-human sympoeisis, on collaboration between and across multitudes of creatures, and on a spectrum of social and semi-social encounter between different species. Through interviews, storytelling, visual material and critical description, this paper develops a notion of hybrid webs as philosophical-aesthetic propositions for multispecies sociality.

In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.