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The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear matters and queries the logic of solids and fluids by developing the notion of elemental memory. An attention to elemental memory – an element’s capacity to auto-affect over time – reveals the inadequacy of terms like solid and fluid, and highlights the expressiveness of solid fluid substances. Empirically, the author demonstrates, first, how elemental memory informs the solid-fluid processuality of radioactive glasses, especially trinitite. Second, engaging with the work of artists Mari Keto and Erich Berger, she addresses the slow auto-transformations of radioactive minerals.

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.

This paper contends that a robust concept of the technosphere – indeed one that is truly adequate to the Anthropocene – must be approached using a plurality of methods that do not categorize agencies or rely on hierarchical scalar analysis. In this commentary, we draw from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism, and in particular her concept of ‘intra-action’, to identify the technosphere as emergent from entangled practices, sites and infrastructures, and to trace the technosphere from the ‘meso’ scale to subatomic and cosmological realms of force and energy. We demonstrate the value of a critical, intra-active approach to technical assemblages by thinking the technosphere concept with and within a vast experimental apparatus: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

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.

This paper develops the concept of a poetics of air: a notion borrowed from cultural anthropology that denotes an awareness of the simultaneous material, affective and aesthetic impressions of air and atmosphere. While there is a rich and growing body of work on atmospheric geopolitics and aeromobility, much less attention has been given to the affective and aesthetic dimensions of being in and witnessing air and atmosphere. This paper uses the sensory, affective and aesthetic experience of engaging with an artwork – Dryden Goodwin's large-scale urban installation Breathe – to reflect on the possibility and promise of an airy poetics for expanding disciplinary concerns with air and atmosphere. It is through producing a moving image that is sustained, ventilated and activated by air – achieved through the artist's production of a visual sequence and ‘active surface’ – that Breathe performs an airy poetics: it conveys the porosity of breathing bodies, the texture and materiality of air, and suggests what a collective sensing of atmosphere might look and feel like.

It is a definition of elemental air as more than human, wholly ungraspable, and even monstrous, which enlivens Adey’s method of ‘affinitive listening’ to the elemental. The difference between air, as it has been lately addressed, and the element of air is that the latter precedes and exceeds the specific alchemical compositions of air masses, and is not reducible to the descriptions and metaphors with which we attempt to ‘grasp’ air and atmosphere. This commentary experiments with the concept of elemental air and, in particular, the method of affinitive listening, with the help of an atmospheric thing. I propose the Montgolfier infrared balloon as a device that sounds and senses air, generating materials and space times that render explicit, and also ungraspable, the atmospheric envelope around Earth.

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.