Transcript
LK = Lutz Koepnick
ML = Maren Loveland
TH = Tori Hoover
SS = Susan Schuppli
JS = Joseph Siry
YF = Yuriko Furuhata
Introduction
LK:
Earlier in April, a team of scientists ran some experiments in the Bay area shooting aerosols into the air. They were rightly worried that the Global North would fail to meet its goal to reduce carbon emissions and halt planetary warming. What they were trying to do is called cloud brightening, where you emit huge numbers of tiny droplets into the atmosphere to change the composition of clouds and reduce solar radiation.
ML:
I read about this, too. Didn’t they use a decommissioned aircraft carrier as a base for this experiment?
LK:
Right. The Hornet, moored in Alameda. Next step will be to try this out on a larger scale, somewhere amid or above the Pacific.
ML:
You sound skeptical.
LK:
Hm. Let’s say deeply worried. No one really knows at this point how any of this might affect climate patterns around the planet. And I am not really sure you can develop models as complex and comprehensive to foretell all possible effects of this.
ML:
But it might be our best bet at this point. It’s unclear to me though who that “our” in “our best bet” actually is. Who is doing the betting? And on whose account?
LK:
Which is exactly the problem, right? There’s, for once, the questions whether some humans can fix the very mess other humans created in trying to control nature in the first place.
ML:
Or whether that simply reiterates the problem.
LK:
Right.
ML:
But also: whether this hope for technological solutions, call them geoengineering, call them climate interventions, obscures how political climate and temperature has become today.
LK:
And, in turn, it inspires fossil fuel industries to keep doing their business as usual. We’ll clearly need new technologies now and in the future to reverse what other technologies have done to warm our planet already. But what we need just as urgently are much more rigorous discussions about the fact that climate technologies don’t live in a vacuum.
ML:
Or, as the climate scholar Yuriko Furuhata says: our desire to condition the temperature of air, whether in our apartments or on a planetary scale, always also involves a conditioning of humans, of us as subjects. We’ll hear more about Furuhata’s thought-provoking book Climatic Media later in today’s program.
LK:
Our main guests today, however, are London-based Canadian artist and scholar Susan Schuppli. Her series of videos called Cold Cases of 2022 asks tough questions about the politics of temperature today . . .
ML
. . . and Joe Siry, an architectural historian who has written a lot about the history of air conditioning in the United States. His work encourages people in the Global North to rethink dominant standards of comfort and convenience amid a warming world.
LK:
Temperature is crime, Schuppli says in one of her videos. Let’s see what she means with this . . . and how it sheds light on what drives contemporary ideas of geoengineering and climate intervention.
TH:
From Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, this is Art of Interference: a podcast about creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we talk with artists and experts who work at the intersection of nature, technology, and science today.
Today’s episode is co-hosted by Maren Loveland and Lutz Koepnick.
PART ONE
SS:
Cinema has never really been able to represent the effects of cold weather adequately. I mean, there are certain cinematic tropes we encounter, like a shivering body, fogged breath. But temperature it's a condition that we don't, in some way, have direct access to. But we can, we both experience and we can represent its effects.
LK:
This is Susan Schuppli, a-Swiss-born Canadian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in London. Susan teaches at Goldsmith College. Her book Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence explores how we in the modern world bear witness to recent war crime cases and environmental catastrophes. Her three videos, Cold Cases, is related to this scholarly work. All three were shot in 2021 and 2022.
SS:
I produced three cold cases in collaboration with the human rights agency Forensic Architecture, and I thought these three cases they required the kind of, analysis that that Forensic Architecture had developed methodologically. They address the frameworks or lack thereof of any accountability. and they required the production of an aesthetic language because temperature doesn't have an obvious visual form.
LK:
Temperature is hard to visualize; it’s hard to audify. But Susan has developed unique methodologies to reveal the use and abuse of temperature, the weaponization of air conditioning and thermostatic control. Her three cases studies are called: Freezing Death and Abandonments Across Canada; Weaponizing Water Against Water Protectors at Standing Rock; and perhaps most importantly: Icebox Detention Along The US-Mexico Border. In all three, thermostastic control becomes a register of violence, of form of colonizing people’s bodies and minds with often invisible means. These case studies examine a new regime of thermo-politics. They raise deeply uncomfortable questions about temperature control, the conditioning of air, heat, and cold, in our warming, our boiling world. One segment of Icebox Detention shows us images of the border wall, a huge detention center in Arizona and interior shots of the facilities, accompanied by Susan’s voiceover:
SS:
All along the U. S. Mexico border, a desert landscape emanates with intense heat by day. Located within this increasingly militarized geography are a series of icebox detention centers, carceral spaces derived from the cold calculations of U. S. homeland security.
LK:
Later we cut to surveillance images of various holding cells. We see people—newly arrived migrants—wrapped in thin aluminum blankets, then the image of a computer reconstruction of the cell allowing to model the temperature, of what is called more scientifically: the volumetric heat capacity—of this room:
SS:
Testimonies from former icebox detainees and even guards corroborate accounts of the dire conditions experienced in these cells, all emphasizing how frigid it gets with air conditioning blasting throughout the facilities. Detainees describe being forced to sit and sleep, sometimes for multiple nights, on cold, concrete floors and benches, receiving little or no food or clean drinking water.
LK:
Icebox Detention remains a largely untold story amid all the debates and controversies we have had about migrants crossing the Mexican-American border over the last decades. . I asked Susan about this and how her video tried to capture the cruelty of temperature management at these facilities:
SS:
People crossing the border are put into these temporary holding cells, before they go through the official, asylum process. And these temporary holding or detention facilities, are, very, very cold. They're made out of concrete flooring. People are given flimsy sleeping mats. Long sleeved clothing is removed because it's considered a suicide threat, so that case worked with images taken from a CCTV camera into cells where detainees are sleeping on the floor with those silver blankets that are given to, migrants.
LK:
Many of these migrants today, many more in the years to come, flee their homes because the global inequities of climate change erode their livelihood, lead to economic, political, and social turmoil that becomes intolerable. All of them arrive at the border after long exposure to extreme temperature and heat, they are utterly exhausted and often disoriented, so their placement in excessively airconditioned detention cells is everything but comforting
SS:
These really low res, images were part of an evidence package in a legal case that a human rights organization had filed, and the judge made these images available. It's one of the few times where we actually had any visual insight into what goes on in this detention facility, the cells , in Spanish, they're referred to as hileras, which means icebox, so, because they're so chilly, guards have, you know, the full uniform, they're properly kitted out, but people, who've, been walking three days, maybe in poor health, exhausted, fatigued, had very adverse reactions, as was chronicled by all the human rights organizations, to the cold temperatures of these holding cells. Migrants said that the guards threatened to turn down the temperature as a kind of punishment.
LK:
Icebox detention centers along the US-Mexican border are operated by the U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose acronym is, well, ICE. The US Homeland Security Act of 2002 endowed ICE with sweeping civil and criminal authority, consolidated into one of the most powerful federal law enforcement agencies in the country. Susan’s video uses all kinds of creative strategies to visualize what is typically hidden from view: computer graphics and animation, spatial montages of different CCTV film, text overlays with testimonies, depositions, historical and scientific facts.
SS:
Between entities over time, we modeled the architecture, materials, bodies, and air of a typical holding cell based on visual evidence revealed during a legal proceeding.
LK:
Susan’s work emphasizes that different bodies respond quite differently to cold temperatures.
SS:
The ideal office temperature for men in suits is about 21 degrees Celsius.
LK:
That's 70 degrees Fahrenheit for our American listeners.
SS
And because men in suits determined all the regulations, the optimal room temperature is set at 21, whereas if you're female, it's 24 --
LK:
That’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
SS:
-- which is why lots of women feel uncomfortable in offices that men have designed. Females are more sensitive to cold than males, particularly in their extremities. So when you cool a room, females shut down more profoundly, and it takes more heat to open up the blood flow control to their hands and feet again. The relevant point is that the temperature of the extremities is a really big determinant of overall thermal comfort.
LK:
In one of the two other Cold Cases, Susan Schuppli and her team explore the strategic use of temperature during the indigenous protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock around 2016. Highly militarized police here employed water cannons to drench protesters during sub-freezing temperatures in the winter, well aware—as the video shows with the help of numerous documents—that exposure to water under North Dakota’s harsh atmospheric conditions would directly lead to hypothermia, to frost-bite and other life-threatening effects.
SS:
One of the things that we tried to do with the cold cases was to really establish a pattern of harm that arises out of the willful instrumentalization or weaponization of temperature. Over very different geographies and contexts, and to see how this is still an ongoing practice. They're climactic in nature and they call for a climactic sense of justice.
LK:
Or as her voice over for the Icebox Detention piece concludes:
SS:
in the operations of icebox detention, temperature is formally inscribed within its regulatory framework and thus features as a strategic weapon of law enforcement. Cold, in this case, functions as both punishment and deterrence. When the extreme heat of migratory passage gives way to the chilling experiences of detention: Temperature becomes a crime.
JG: Wait, can I jump in here?
LK:
Ok, Jen, what’s up?
JG:
We’ve been talking a lot about the problems associated with managing temperature through air conditioning. This of course an important consideration, but we haven’t said much about the need for air conditioning in a warming world. After all, heat waves are becoming a more frequent occurrence and serious threat as we navigate the effects of climate change.
As many studies show, there is a direct correlation between not having access to air conditioning and heat-related mortality, so we need to be careful not to call for an end to air conditioning all together.
JG:
As global temperatures continue to rise and summer months get increasingly hotter, heat exhaustion and heat-related deaths will remain a significant risk-factor for those without access to air conditioning. And much as Susan brings attention to the cruel and unusual punishment of putting migrants in “iceboxes” at the border, there’s a related human rights issue involved with the lack of air conditioning for other groups of detainees, such as prisoners.
In April 2024, prison rights advocates filed a complaint against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about the lack of air-conditioning in cells where prison inmates are being held. Though prisons are required by law to keep cells under 85 degrees Fahrenheit, record-breaking heat through summer months regularly pushes temperatures in jails into the triple digits. In the past two decades, nearly two dozen Texas inmates have died because of heat stroke and these numbers are thought to be low due to underreporting.
LK:
These are really important considerations. We will actually get back to these issues later when we talk to the historian of air conditioning Joe Siry...
JG: I’ll look forward to that! Hopefully he can help put into perspective what role air conditioning will play as we learn to navigate a world of extreme heat.
ML:
It’s just as Susan says: temperature as crime. As violence, even.
LK:
That’s pretty provocative, Maren.
ML:
Maybe so. But look, while much of Susan’s work is about the violence of controlled cooling, I think it also raises challenging questions about how we deal, or should deal, with an increasingly boiling world as well.
LK:
Yes! The New York Times recently reported that heat contributes to even more fatalities than we may have previously thought -- directly and indirectly. Hotter climates increase crime rates, domestic violence, unfocused driving as much as it produces cardiac arrest and deadly dehydration.
ML:
And it’s important that we have a conversation about what artists and scientists can do to cool down the world—without committing violence or injustice. What kind of frameworks do we need to ensure temperature regulation doesn’t only play into the hands of the powerful?
YF:
I'm interested in, uh, history of geoengineering.
ML:
This is Yuriko Furuhata, a media scholar at McGill University in Toronto.
YF:
geoengineering, or the, the human control of the weather and climate, has recently gained a lot of attention. Paul Crutzen—
ML:
Paul Crutzen is the Dutch meteorologist who in 2000 introduced the term Anthropocene--
YF:
he's saying, because we do live in the climate crisis, we need a kind of radical intervention to fix the planet and by, let's say, making like artificial clouds right by, um, seeding the stratosphere and create a blanket to block the sunlight and so forth. It is a technology that many of the scientists and engineers are working on, but also it's a very fantastical practice, right?
ML:
We have of course talked about artificial clouds already in an earlier episode of this season when speaking with Tomas Saraceno.
LK:
Yes, you had this wonderful conversation with him in episode 3. He’s such a freewheeling artist and thinker.
ML:
Right. For Saraceno clouds served as intriguing models for new forms of sustainable travel and sociality. Furuhuta however has something else in mind. She refers to a 1954 magazine article, in which
YF:
one, American Navy guy who's retired says, what if we can order weather like any other commodities? Right? And he says, like, then maybe we can have rain only on Wednesdays, because no one wants to have rain on the weekend. Of course that did not happen, right? We cannot control weather like that.
LK:
Most of us are probably guilty of this kind of thinking, sometime somewhere. Treat temperature and weather as if we could fully control and always happily consume it.
ML:
Unfortunately, Yuriko wasn’t available for an interview. But in her book, Climatic Media, she calls this idea “thermostatic desire”: the desire to construct and maintain atmospheric bubbles with the help of virtual thermostats, on micro- or macro-levels, indoor and outdoor, as if Earth or whatever is around us was a giant air conditioning unit. More so than perhaps ever before, our world of climate change is driven, as she calls it, by “technophilic desires to posit atmosphere itself as an object of calibration, control, and engineering.” To meet the challenges of climate change, people develop ever more technologies and techniques to produce climate-controlled bubbles that modify the weather and produce lost comforts through air-conditioning.
LK:
Many people would argue that’s good, though. The only thing we have left.
ML:
Yes, of course. But Yuriko’s book shows that climate design has a fascinating history. Some of it is deeply involved in the cold war, and a lot of it is unthinkable without the history of modern computing. Yuriko also recalls meteorological experiments with fog, snow, and rain of Japanese scientists and artists . . .
LK:
. . . ah, like Fujiko Nakaya, whose fog machines we discussed in season 1!
ML:
Yes, exactly. And the work of her father Ukichiro Nakaya, who did this amazing research on the complexities of snow in the early twentieth century. But Yuriko’s point, in exploring all these histories, is this: whether we engineer climate at the planetary scale or create small, enclosed environments throughout the warming world, our desire to control the atmosphere and temperature is about way more than just our comfort and convenience. It is deeply political.
LK:
Meaning what. . .?
ML:
Well, Yuriko argues that air conditioning always also involves the conditioning of us as subjects—we modify, habituate, train, acclimatize, and alter our states of being, as she puts it.
LK:
That's kind of antithetical to this podcast’s whole idea of the “art of interference,” right? To the difficult art of establishing new forms of collaboration, of kinship and symbiotic exchange, between us and, well, what is not us. Between humans and the weather, if you wish.
ML:
Definitely. Large-scale cloud seeding or geoengineering are basically the opposite of the art of interference. Geoengineering still rests on the idea that humans can forcibly control the natural world, even though it’s exactly this perspective that created our climate emergencies upon us in the first place. According to Yuriko, there’s no way the potential fruits of climate geoengineering will always be evenly distributed.
LK:
One group may be able to control the thermostat and enjoy convenient temperatures, but others will experience more droughts, unknown floods, more heatwaves, perhaps even more cold.
ML:
Exactly. You might want to think about that the next time you push the dial of your home’s AC.
LK:
Temperature as crime and violence?
ML:
I mean, maybe! But also just as something that is about so much more than merely our sense of convenience. Air conditioning conditions subjects. It is a climatic media, not unlike the detention cells Susan Schuppli explores in her work. And you know, really, in a way, all architecture serves as climatic media.
PART THREE
ML:
Today, we live with the dilemma that as global temperatures rise, human demand for air conditioning and climate control increases—and this demand further intensifies global warming, creating a precarious cycle. In order to better understand our current relationship with air conditioning, and possibly find ways of mitigating this precarity, we need to investigate its history. Which is why I sat down to talk with Joseph Siry, a specialist of the history of air conditioning and architecture at Wesleyan University.
ML:
What do you think are the main takeaways from understanding a history of air conditioning? What can understanding that history maybe do or change the way that we understand it today?
JS:
So the big challenge, is how to balance its benefits with the environmental costs. And those have mostly to do with the fossil fuels that are used to produce the electricity that air conditioning uses. And also to help build urban environments in such a way that they don't build up heat as much as they normally do.
ML:
In the modernist period, as air conditioning was becoming more and more popular in buildings and homes, engineers were faced with the unique challenge of integrating climate control systems into architectural designs. Air conditioning, then, was an aesthetic and artistic problem just as much as it was an engineering one.
JS:
There are mechanical engineers who speak like artists when they talk about moving air. And they see themselves as creating optimal balances of systems that are relatively energy conserving and optimal for habitability. So there is that artistic impulse in some engineers, I focus on an architect like Louis Kahn, who was enormously receptive to the possibility that mechanical systems could be integrated into the three dimensional structural and spatial and visual character of architecture in ways that acknowledge their necessity.
But made them part of the visual language of the three-dimensional form of the building. And one of the biggest issues that was something of a conceptual hurdle in the mid twentieth century is the design of interstitial space in buildings. The volumes that contain mechanical services as part of the original conception of the overall three-dimensional architecture and how they're constructed, visually or formally expressed or accommodated. So that understanding of interstitial space is based on a dialogue between an engineer like Fred Dubin, who was Louis Kahn's principal engineer for the Salk Institute, and Kahn as an architect who's thinking a lot about formal and material and spatial issues. I think it was a stimulus to creativity for someone like him. And there are other architects that I think have similarly embraced it in that way. I’m thinking of problems of architecture being stimuli to creativity. There's poetic potential in embracing climatic concerns. And that to me is a wonderful theoretical and historical problem.
ML:
Climate control engineers were approaching climate control design with the passion and ethos of artists, combining their mechanical expertise with an eye towards aesthetics. But they were also extremely practical—many early air conditioning engineers prioritized energy conservation in their designs, though they probably wouldn’t have called themselves “conservationists.” Rather, these early designs and practices are models for contemporary air conditioning practices.
JS:
I'm seeing that the conservational ethos, which was pre digital in the first century of air conditioning, more or less, now transposing into a digitally controlled environment in our period. But that's a hugely good thing in terms of decreasing the energy demands to create to sustain climatically acceptable interiors.
So there's such a thing called urban heat islands that are areas of a lot of building, a lot of paving, and they're hotter, than areas that are not so heavily built up. So what countries like Singapore now are doing is introducing green space into the heart of urban environments to bring down the ambient air temperature around buildings so that air conditioning systems aren't so heavily taxed.
ML:
Understanding the history of climate control has direct benefits not only to contemporary architecture designs, but also for politics. The more we understand about the past, the better informed we are on current issues. That can help us make better decisions for the future.
JS:
I'm now educating a generation of students in courses that I teach on energy and modern architecture, and my colleagues all over the world are doing the same thing. This generation is vastly more alert and attuned to the environmental consequences of climate of building technologies and a whole range of other technologies that aren't buildings, and that's going to impact their voting behavior.
I have no doubt. And 2022 was the first time that there was an uptick in younger voters in this country in many election cycles, since I think they first approved 18-year-old voting, which was back in the 1970s. So there's now a cohort of younger people moving into voting age that take sustainability as a given for their political behavior.
ML:
In other words, there is hope for the future. People all over the world are finding ways of adjusting their levels of comfort to accommodate rising temperatures. Siry explains that, for example, church congregations across the United States have committed to reducing energy consumption by moving to geothermal energy systems. These commitments are enacted through a re-attunement towards architecture.
JS:
So here's a group of people. who are in a religious denomination that's committed to environmental responsibility, and they've said, we're going to change our definition of comfort.
And that, that's not an isolated case. There are a lot of religious institutions that are doing this. Historic churches like Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston, they built a new geothermal system. So they're not dependent on just burning oil. They're using heat stored in stable temperature ground water, which is a vastly better way to do it, but they have to be able to make the investment to do that.
ML:
Just like engineers of the 1920s and 1930s, we need to re-condition our own architectures to accommodate new environmental conditions and facilitate new cultures of comfort. And this isn’t a bad thing, as Siry reminds me.
JS:
things don't have to get worse. Our future does not have to repeat our past. We don't have to keep doing the same ineffective things that we have been doing. We can change and we are changing for the better. So to me, this is a very hopeful way to look at things.
And I, I assume awareness will increase. And behaviors will change, and technology will improve, and it's a global story. And it'll be part of your lifetime.
INTERFERENCE TWO
JG:
You know what drives me crazy?
LK:
Tell me, Jen.
[jingle]
JG:
How people are constantly idling their cars in 75-degree weather to cool them down to a more conveniently comfortable temperature of 72 degrees instead.
LK:
Or who blast their ACs at night because they no longer want to open a window.
JG:
That’s probably just one tip of many icebergs.
LK:
Literally.
JG:
Not to get too behind-the-scenes, but it reminds me of a book we talked about while researching this episode: Mechanization takes Command, by famous twentieth-century historian Sigfrid Gideon.
LK:
Right!
JG:
Gideon basically takes us back a few centuries to discuss what people in Europe at that time defined as comfort. The word “comfort” actually derives from Latin and in its original use in early modern times it meant to describe things and structures that strengthen and support individuals in their daily encounters with taxing realities.
LK:
Unlike the things we call “convenient,” comforts in other words prepare body and mind to flourish in face, not in spite, of the order of the day.
JG:
So what is comfortable isn’t meant to just give us a break from difficult circumstances, or bring us pleasure amid the unpleasurable or unbearable.
LK:
No: true comforts are generative. They ease things, not for the sake of easiness as such, but to make our daily encounter with our environments lighter. They prop us up to strengthen our ability to engage with the unfavorable or unexpected, to adapt and in adapting to transform the world around us. So reconceptualizing “comfort” more in the way Gideon sees it, might help us to rethink how to deal with climate change in the future as well?
JG:
I might be stretching his ideas a little here. But, yes, there is something in his work that makes me think of comfort as a formula, that asks us to co-evolve with what exceeds our control. Climate change clearly asks us to change our ideas about comfort levels, however uneasy such discussions might be.
LK:
But more importantly, if I understand you right, what is really needed is a thorough conversation about what we define as comfort in the first place.
JG:
Who defines comfort, and for whom? Are some supposed “comforts” merely conveniences, especially for the privileged? And how can we strengthen the comfort of those who suffer most from the effects of climate change?
LK:
Your comforts are not necessarily mine. What you think is convenient might be inconvenient for me.
JG:
If we follow Gideon’s understanding of comfort, what we really need to do is disentangle the ideas of comfort and convenience. We need to understand that in order to make this warming world more comfortable for others, we might have to be inconvenienced ourselves. Maybe that means biking 20 minutes on a hot summer day when we could make the drive in 10 sweat-free with our car. But it’s worth it to distribute comfort more equitably across the world, no?
LK:
I think you’re right. Though I have to say, I’m not sure this really helps you rethink your usual anger about idling drivers or freezing hotel rooms. But it does underscore the importance of art in these conversations about climate change—at its best, art is something that makes us ask hard questions about how we sense the world, and even how we imagine what it means to take comfort in it.
PART THREE
LK:
Susan Schuppli surely pushes the limits of comfort and convenience in her work as artist and researcher. Over the years, she has worked in pretty remote corners of the globe, often amid freezing temperatures, to probe the impact of climate change. In one of her projects, she sailed the Arctic Ocean around Svalbard only to see her camera become useless due to the cold.
SS:
I grew up camping, whitewater, canoeing, You're uncomfortable if you don't have the right, equipment, which is the case with icebox detention. if people had proper clothing, et cetera, like the guards, they wouldn't find themselves in these sort of shivering and hypothermic states. So in general, I do have the right gear and equipment. I'm prepared in that way. And I really, really enjoy field work. It's, being in a location and having a kind of project in my head and finding, I'm always looking for things the film, the film project comes to me or it emerges I really enjoy that experience. In Svalbard, temperature was a huge factor in how the equipment that we had brought along worked and the camera really stopped functioning. It was so cold there, the sensors really failed on the camera, batteries drained, Svalbard was the case where temperature became part of the system of recording and really registered itself in terms of malfunctioning glitches. Temperature was really determining the quality of the recording that happened.
LK:
Art for Susan is neither meant to be convenient nor comforting. It pushes her, it pushes our levels of comfort, in physical but of course also in psychological or conceptual ways, as in the Cold Cases we discussed earlier. Media technologies play a big role in her work. But similar to what scholar John Durham Peters suggested in our earlier episode on Clouds, Susan sometimes thinks of the natural environment, of ice, water, or air, as elemental medium as well, or what she calls a media system. Here’s her thoughts about the importance of media, and about the relation of technology and nature, within her artistic practice:
SS:
In, you know, each project, it operates slightly differently. In some projects, I'm working very directly dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There was an underwater, camera monitoring the, the spill there were satellites that were capturing image data over the course of that spill. There was another imaging agent on the scene, which was this bill itself, that was producing these very large images. What's called an oil film by scientists, in fact, because it refers directly to the ways in which hydrocarbon molecules interact with water and light, and it produces this sort of film. It's kind of like a living, surface, if you will, right? And for me, I thought, that is media. It has a lot of the properties that we would have come to define with more technical imaging systems.
My working definition of an ecological system as a media system is also indebted to the thinking of Jennifer Gabris, her book program Earth. There's all of these sensors that are capturing data of environmental systems, but the, ecological system itself is also generating a data layer the example that she uses is that of moss because moss absorbs atmospheric contaminants and in absorbing those airborne pollutants, it produces an aesthetic effect, if you will. It changes coloration. And so, sensors are looking at the ways in which moss is generating information about atmospheric conditions. Sensors are monitoring moss and producing a data set. But we could say that the moss itself is producing a data layer. I think that's a helpful way to think about media, how is it that different entities are all producing a certain kind of data layer to produce a knowledge about something or information about something.
LK:
Susan’s thoughts about moss as a sensor, as a listening and recording device, or, as she calls it in her book, a “material witness" -- it brings us back to the challenge of representing, of working with air temperature. Temperature, we recall, can be a crime. Air conditioning is a way of conditioning us as subjects. Whoever amid our boiling world can control atmospheric or domestic temperatures might own the key to power and privilege, the power of privilege, the privilege of power. But temperature and air evade easy representation. We can look at its effects, but it’s hard to visualize or audify as such. Unless you—like so many other artists we discussed in Art of Interference-- somehow manage to approach air and temperature as a collaborator in your artistic project. Here’s a sslice of a conversation Susan recalls between her and a record producer who mixed sound for a vinyl record of one of her sound projects:
SS:
he was saying to me, , Susan, every field recording that you've produced is also an archive of the temperature and air pressure of the day that you did that recording.
Because air is a medium and the way that sound moves through that medium, it is directly impacted by the quality of air, the moisture content, temperature, pressure, et cetera. I sort of knew that, but in him saying that these field recordings where I'm recording ambient environmental sounds, are in themselves also systems that are registering other kinds of events like the event of temperature and that oh this is something I really want to delve into in the sense that temperature is modifying the materials that I'm producing and how is it that I can maybe make that modification or that modulation the effect that temperature is exerting on the materials that I produce, how can I make that more perceivable in some way? So maybe that's the way that I could collaborate by bringing that out. I think that would be a really, amazing kind of, project because temperature, really an area of work that I, I really want to continue to delve Into and pursue,
LK:
Collaboration is central to Susan’s artistic practice, whether that means approaching air and temperature as media or working with communities in the Himalayas and along the US-Mexican border to feature the thermostatic violence of climate and migration policies. Susan has also collaborated specialists from Forensic Architecture in London. Since its inception around 2010 and led by the trained architect Eyal Weizman, FA’s group of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers has investigated cases of state violence and human rights violations all over the world. Some of what they do has been admitted in legal processes around the world, but it’s also been shown at art museums and art festivals. Their work combines data and art in really interesting ways. In the US, they are perhaps best known for their film Triple-Chaser. Shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2019, the piece investigated the use of tear gas grenades at the US-Mexican border and elsewhere around the world, and it revealed certain ties between state violence and big business. The main subject of investigation was Warren B. Kanders, CEO of one of the main manufactures of such grenades who also happened to be vice chair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art—which created a major scandal at the Biennial.
Forensic Architecture works in a gray space between law and art, and that means they’re simultaneously celebrated and scorned by both worlds. Legal scholars sometimes dismiss their work as mere art, art audiences as merely didactic. But for Susan, this space in between disciplines and discourses is inspirational and productive—and her effort to complicate how we think about evidence by no means limits aesthetic creativity.
SS:
I give myself quite a lot of creative liberty in all of my projects I'm usually trying to tell a fairly complicated story earlier bodies of work were really engaging with evidence trials and tribunals and really trying to narrate the abstractions of law, and I really saw my task as a kind of mediator later works similarly are engaging oftentimes with climate science and similarly trying to narrate very, complex scientific accounts for a more of a lay audience. So they're not about developing a robust legal case that is going to stand up to the scrutiny of. a court, I work with what I call proxies, as an artist, I have given myself, a ot of, liberty. I've given myself license and permission to work with materials in ways that simply wouldn't be possible for an NGO like Forensic Architecture because of the level of scrutiny that, always comes their way
LK:
Many of us, when we hear the word “forensic,” think of sleek TV shows with smart cops and nerdy scientists who unravel entire murder cases using some minute overlooked detail. Susan and her collaborators use the term in a different way. Forensic work is not about producing singular truths that put someone behind bars; it’s about unlocking and offering complex cases for the larger public—the forum of general discourse. Art plays an important role in this endeavor, and it certainly does much more than just visualize certain facts. Art makes us consider how we represent things in the first place, how we tell stories or produce images—how we know—about forms of violence that often remain unseen and unsaid. Susan’s work on thermopolitics shows us what art can do to turn the often unrepresentable weaponization of temperature into a matter of public concern.
ML:
In today’s episode, we have talked a lot about things we’ve read. Books by Yuriko Furuhata about climatic media, by Siegfrid Gideon about mechanization and our ideas of comfort, by Joe Siry about the history of air conditioning and architecture, and of course Susan Schuppli’s own book. I want to add one more item to his reading list to conclude today’s episode. It’s Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s remarkable biography The Right to be Cold. Sheila is one of Canada's most outspoken environmental and human rights activists, and in her writing she addresses the devastating effects of climate change from the perspective of her own upbringing as Inuit in the Arctic.
“Inuit of my generation,” Sheila writes, “have lived in both the ice age and the space age. The modern world arrived slowly in some places in the world, and quickly in others. But in the Arctic, it appeared in a single generation. I have seen Inuit traditional wisdom supplanted by southern programs and institutions. And most shockingly, I have seen what seemed permanent begin to melt away.”
Ice, snow, and subzero temperatures are part of the fabric of everyday life in the Arctic. It’s built into the society, the spirituality of the Inuit people. For Sheila, the right to be cold is a basic human right. This right, however, is not at all about controlling the environment at all costs, not about leading a life of mere convenience. It’s also definitely not meant to offer a free pass for people to crank up their ACs or use frigid temperatures to shock fatigued migrants into submission. On the contrary. The right to be cold is about living in symbiotic relationships with the non-human world. It’s about working with local atmospheric conditions, and it recognizes the right to remain unscathed by economic, political, or technological decisions made in faraway places.
Air temperature is a political issue. Some people hope large-scale geoengineering will help turn down the heat on our warming planet. But Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Susan Schuppli remind us that these visions may well add to the crimes, violence, inequities industrialized nations have already perpetuated in the name of temperature. The cruelties of thermostatic desire are myriad. But our goal must not be to reengineer the world and secure artificial bubbles of survival for some. We need to safeguard our entanglement with the world around us. We have to figure out how we can facilitate our own comfort without violating the comfort of others—to help communities the world over collaborate with the elements, instead of dominating them.