Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control. By Yuriko Furuhata.

Abstract

Yuriko Furuhata’s Climatic Media is a fascinating study of climate control technologies in twentieth-century Japan. The book turns on the concept of “atmospheric control,” which Furuhata describes as “a double process of condition: air conditioning and social conditioning” (8, emphasis in original). She introduces the term “climatic media” to name the techniques and technologies associated with climate control, from scientific research on weather prediction to architectural structures designed for cold climates. Furuhata carefully unfolds genealogies of climatic media that attend to the material, epistemological, aesthetic, and geopolitical connections among artificial fog, weather control, and digital computing; air conditioning, meteorology, and futurology; greenhouses, architectural bubbles, and space colonies; spaceships, capsule architecture, and plastic; and tear gas, networked surveillance, and cybernetics. Throughout, she attends to the role of Japan’s colonial history and its alliance with the United States in the Cold War in shaping these geological connections. Furuhata’s study of climatic media’s transpacific connections between Japan and the United States is a rich and insightful demonstration of a comparative and historically, culturally, and geopolitically situated approach to elemental media studies. Despite her attention to transpacific geopolitics, Furuhata employs a “mobile analysis” whose movement is modeled on the “borderless” circulation of weather events rather than on the borders of geopolitical territories (18). This mobile analysis moves dynamically across art, science, architecture, and digital computing, touching down on key examples and highlighting junctures where these fields intersect to trace climatic media’s complex genealogies. Chapter 1, “Outdoor Weather: Artificial Fog and Weather Control,” aptly demonstrates Furuhata’s method. Its examination of Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture opens up to artworks and architectural forms that employ artificial fog technologies, as well as scientific research on weather modification; as the chapter moves across these domains, Furuhata identifies key personal and institutional transpacific connections between Japan and the United States across shifting geopolitical contexts.