The Aerocene Campus on November 26, 2016, at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, was a space to explore the techniques, practices, geopolitics, and philosophy of the Aerocene and to perform them through direct engagement with the public. In more ways than the name suggests, the event resonated with the Anthropocene Campus, organized and hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, to mobilize an urgent international and cross-disciplinary response to the Anthropocene. In this short piece I will reflect on the Aerocene Campus, how it generated different trajectories of thinking, working, and collaborating, and how it may meaningfully contribute to many post-Anthropocenic futures we might call the Aerocene.

Althrough Aerocene is an “open-source artistic project” initiated by Studio Tomás Saraceno, it is a project animated by conversations and actions between numerous researchers, institutions and activists worldwide. Among these are: the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department (EAPS) and the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); CNES (French National Space Agency); CCK Argentina; Public Lab; The Goethe Institute; Radioamateur; Freifunk; the Institut für Architekturbezogene Kunst; TBA21; and the Center for GeoHumanities. The Aerocene is also the name for a new, hopeful, post-Anthropocenic epoch of Earth’s planetary history. Finally, Aerocene refers to several specific aerostatic sculptures – for example the D-OAEC Aerocene, Aerocene Explorer or the Aerocene Gemini (see image above).

In October 2016, Aerocene came to London for the Aerocene Residency on Exhibition Road. The residency, co-produced by the Exhibition Road Commission, is an initiative bringing together seventeen prestigious cultural and scientific institutions at this historic site. In its first two months, Aerocene initiated collaborations with numerous scientists, engineers, and designers in institutions on Exhibition Road, investigating topics as diverse as aerial biodiversity sampling and cosmic dust collection. The initiative also included invitations to students, post-doctoral-, and other researchers: Aerocene Hack 1 at Imperial College Advanced Hackspace took place over the weekend of October 28‒31, 2016, and resulted in several proposals for changes and additions to Aerocene hardware and software, including modifications to the Aerocene Explorer interface and applications for photogrammetry and air-pollution monitoring. Aerocene Hack 2 then unfolded over the weekend of November 25‒27, 2016, and connected directly to the first Aerocene Campus. In fact, the spirit of “hacking” informed both Aerocene Hack 2 and the Aerocene Campus as a whole, and it will continue to play an important role in the Aerocene residency on Exhibition Road.

To hack is to creatively overcome the limitations of a system, to improve or subvert the intentions of its original form in a spirit of playfulness and exploration. In the spirit of hacking, the Aerocene Campus called upon researchers, scientists, students, and activists alike to creatively address a few key Aerocene topics, namely Free Flight, Life in the Air, and Sounding. The invitation of the Aerocene Campus was to ask how, collectively, we can “hack” the Anthropocene to co-create the Aerocene. The three zones of Free Flight, Life in the Air, and Sounding were elaborated by three panels of experts, provocateurs, reporters and communicators from the diverse fields of geography, anthropology, philosophy, microbiology, design, engineering, music composition and programming, among others. The panelists and speakers included: Tomás Saraceno (Studio Saraceno), Sir Brian Hoskins (Imperial College London), Bill McKenna (MIT EAPS), Bronislaw Szerszynski (University of Lancaster), Pete Adey (Royal Holloway), Harriet Hawkins (Royal Holloway), Anne Jungblut and Holger Thues (Natural History Museum), Nick Shapiro (Public Lab), Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster), Hannah Meszaros-Martin (Goldsmiths), Derek McCormack (University of Oxford), Sven Steudte (Radioamateur Freifunk), Federico Bolza (Sony Music), Sam Hertz (Independent Artist and composer), Ronald Jones (RCA) and Nerea Calvillo (Warwick University).

Building the web between technical and conceptual work was an important challenge and the highlight of the campus. A group of advanced technical hackers who had responded to the open call for Aerocene Hack 2 joined the Aerocene Campus for the opening panels, and shared ideas about how they would develop some of the topics of discussion into technical hacks for the Aerocene. There were certainly many highlights in the discussion and working sessions, although only a few can be detailed here. In particular, the Free Flight Panel included a demonstration by Bill McKenna of the new Aerocene flight-prediction interface developed jointly by MIT and Studio Saraceno among other partners. McKenna demonstrated how potential Aerocene pilots could input their launch site and destination, in order to witness the path an Aerocene sculpture would take to catch the right winds and to achieve the destination goal. Bronislaw Szersynski responded to this demonstration with thoughts on “great fluid motion” and the dispersal of seeds, while Pete Adey added comments on the darker connotations of levitation, ascension, and drift. These words resonated in Harriet Hawkins’ address at the end of the panel, which considered the imaginary quality of “flights of fancy” from the climbs of Alexander von Humboldt to contemporary art‒science practices.

Since the weather was uncharacteristically sunny, the Free Flight panel was spontaneously interrupted by the launch of Aerocene Explorer in an Imperial College garden. After walking over quickly to the launch site, Campus participants listened to an impromptu lecture on cloud-formations by Sir Brian Hoskins as Aerocene Explorer lifted gently off the grass in the garden, held by Daniel Schulz and Alexander Bouchner.

After returning to the RCA, the afternoon panel sessions began with Life in the Air. Anne Jungblut and Holger Thues presented their proposal for a collaboration between Aerocene and the Natural History Museum through a citizen science project to monitor lichens, microbes, and other living things in the air over Exhibition Road. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos considered the affective resonance of Aerocene Explorer and the lawscapes of the air, while Nick Shapiro related how a project such as Aerocene could also meaningfully contribute to the monitoring of various airborne pollutants, or what he termed, “death in the air”. Hannah Meszaros-Martin drew these conversations together with her thoughts on the colonial legacy of exploration and how this should become a critical element of discourse in the Aerocene.

What are the potential applications of Aerocene Explorer to sensing ultrasound and infrasound and of participating in forms of mesh-network communication in the stratosphere? After a micro-lecture by Alexander Bouchner on geo-fencing and cut-down mechanisms, the Sounding panel began with a talk from radioamateur Sven Steudte on the audible sounds of tracking and data transmission in the 2016 flight of Aerocene Gemini. A discussion between Federico Bolza, Sam Hertz and Derek McCormack followed. Hertz reflected on infra- and ultrasound, how Aerocene sculptures might act as floating “ears” for sonic adventures, while McCormack told stories of historical aerostatic envelopes in the UK and abroad, asking what are the modes of address that would allow us to release an entity into the air in an exuberant or joyful mode, rather than one of suspicion or foreboding. Bolza drew from his experience in the music industry to ask whether it might be possible to relinquish the modes of control that have dominated the logics of transportation, extraction, and resource-use in the Holocene given the right sensory and sonic lures in the Aerocene. The participants in Aerocene Hack 2 offered ideas for recordings made in flocks of Aerocene sculptures, and for the perception of sounds of other aerial species.

As the day came to a close, Ronald Jones and Carlo Rizzo drew together the many discussions by asking how the panelists and participants how they would bring Aerocene into their own practice, teaching, and performance. Here, participants were faced with the dilemma of how they might transform the day’s experience into realizable action. A hint of concern surfaced here, as some voices lamented that there had not been more time to turn concepts into actions, while other voices expressed the value in the process of the campus itself, and in the intangible work of sharing time and stories as well as imaginaries of the future. Nevertheless, several ideas emerged for future collaboration, helped greatly by the fact that the Aerocene team intends to develop a system of lending Aerocene Explorer sculptures to users across London and the UK. Although the participants had already witnessed a launch, they were offered the possibility of organizing still others of their own, and designing experiments and projects to animate future launches.

Even more concretely, the energy and tenor of the Aerocene Campus were channeled into Aerocene Hack 2. This hackathon event continued throughout Sunday afternoon, with final presentations at the Imperial College Advanced Hackspace. The presentations included also work by Cambridge-based engineers Adam Greig, Jamie Wood, and Daniel Richman with their flight-prediction interface for helium balloons with updates and modifications for the additional factors affecting Aerocene sculptures, including thermal absorption of the membrane depending on the position of the Sun in relation to the Earth. Grace Papas, a student at Imperial College, presented the “Aerobeak” ‒ an idea for a moth-capturing device attached to the shrinking membrane of an Aerocene sculpture. Alexander Bouchner and Daniel Schulz proposed a net-based capturing device attached to the payload of Aerocene Explorer. And Nick Shapiro elaborated on the work of Public Lab, where he is the Open Air fellow working on devices for activist-monitoring of aerial toxicity. The group was fortunate that Glenn Fierl and Lodovica Ilari skyped in from the MIT for the presentations and offered comments. Tomás Saraceno expressed deep thanks to each of the participants and to the organizers of Imperial College Hackspace for their support of the hacking sessions over the weekend, and the event adjourned on an upward current, a stream of floating. The relationship and resonances between the Aerocene and Anthropocene Campus are many, but a few deserve special mention here. First, both campus events witnessed the potential as well as the pain of accommodating such a wide range of expertise, and in doing so, risking the privileging of some over others. Although carefully negotiated in both cases, one does wonder whether better platforms for addressing such a variety of language and expertise are yet to be constructed. Important in both the Aerocene and Anthropocene Campus was an emphasis on experimentation, and an attention to the risks associated with following an experiment outside of one’s comfort zone. Finally, although the formats of a week-long Anthropocene Campus and a one-to-two-day Aerocene Campus are quite different, both favored provocation, spontaneity, interaction, and speculation. There might still be other relationships. Just as the Aerocene Campus can trace a lineage back to the Aerocene launch during the “Knowing in the Anthropocene” seminar (co-taught by Bronislaw Szerszynski, Zoe Lüthi, Melanie Seghal, Pablo Suarez, Janot Mendler de Suarez and myself in April 2016), perhaps the future of both Aerocene and the Anthropocene Campus will remain linked. Perhaps they will spark still other campus-curricula for the myriad other futures this planet urgently needs. Indeed, as this final design suggests, future Aerocenes and Cthulucenes are likely kin.

More information on Aerocene and the Aerocene Campus can be found at aerocene.org as well as on the seminar page Knowing (in) the Anthropocene.