ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Transposing Distant Atmospheres: The Staging and Spectacle of Simulated Meteorologies

• In Event: Weathering Science

English Abstract

This paper explores the staging of meteorological phenomena dislocated from their ordinary settings, tracing how weather, often considered ephemeral and ungraspable, has been rendered legible, transportable, universal, and manipulable. Artificially constructed atmospheres, whether in chambers, simulations, visualisations, or staged spectacles, do not merely represent meteorology but instantiate a mirrored, chiasmatic relationship in which the real and staged weather mutually inflect one another. The distant is made proximate, vast phenomena are rescaled, and the unfamiliar or fetishised is rendered tangible. From the mirages conjured in the Palace of Illusions (Paris, 1900) to the refracted polar lights of the return of the Vega celebrations, these environments both echo and elucidate the phenomena they stage. Crucially, many staged atmospheres functioned as instruments of epistemic and affective control, allowing observers to apprehend, order, and domesticate climates that were otherwise overwhelming, dangerous, or resistant to European forms of knowledge. Creating artificial atmospheres is not merely a technical exercise but a form of transpositional imagination, producing knowledge, affect, and sensory experience. Far from passive copies, staged atmospheres operate as catalytic mirrors, refracting perception and imagination back onto the natural world and revealing how meteorology is simultaneously performed, and collectively, politically, and socially enacted.

Author

• Fiona Amery, University of Cambridge