Atmospheres: Imagining Air

 

On Atmosphere. A brief etymological note on the word.

Obnubilation. An extended version of a talk given in a series devoted to Clouds, broadcast as BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, 25 February 2009. [pdf version] [ listen] [download mp3]

Unholy Smoke. A talk given at Trailing Smoke, Art Workers Guild, London, 12 November 2008, an evening of talks accompanying the exhibition Smoke, Pump House Gallery, Battersea, curated by Implicasphere. [pdf version]

Thinking Things. A lecture given at ESSE-9, the 9th annual conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Aarhus, Denmark, 25 August 2008. [pdf version]

Taking to the Air. A talk broadcast on Resonance FM, as part of the Free University of the Airwaves, 18-22 August 2008. [ listen]

Gasworks. An essay for the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 6 (2008).

Whisper Music. A lecture given at theTake a Deep Breath symposium, Tate Modern, 15 February 2007. and atGiving Voice, Centre for Performance Research, Aberystwyth, 28 March 2008. [pdf version]

Next to Nothing: The Arts of Air. A talk given at Art Basel, 13 June 2007. [pdf version] A version of this talk appeared in Tate Etc, 12 (2008): 82-93.

Inebriate of Air: Gas, Magic and Omnipotence of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. An extended version of a paper given at the Magical Thinking conference, Birkbeck College, 11 May 2007.

Sound and the Pathos of the Air. A talk given 21st April 2007 at Two Thousand + SEVEN, a symposium held at theSonic Arts Research Center, Queen’s University Belfast, in parallel to the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music.

Strings in the Earth and Air. A lecture given at the Music and Postmodern Cultural Theory Conference, University of Melbourne, December 6th 2006.

Atmospherics: The Weather of Sound. A lecture given at Sounding Out 3, University of Sunderland, 8 September 2006.

Architecture on Air. An interview with Mark Morris, recorded on 27 June 2006, and distributed as part of the podcast interview series Architecture on Air, organised by the School of Architecture of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Exhaust. A talk given at the Modernity and Waste conference, University of St. Andrews, 16th June 2006.

Haze: On Nebular Modernism. A paper given at Modernism and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Art Theory and Literary Theory, Trinity College, Oxford, 12 May, 2006. [pdf version]

Thermotaxis. An essay on the thermodynamics of culture written in April 2005.

A Dim Capacity For Wings: Angels, Flies and the Material Imagination. A paper given at a research seminar in the Department of English, University of Stirling, 10 November 2004.

‘Transported Shiver of Bodies': Weighing the Victorian Ether. A lecture given at Victorian Sensation, the conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies, University of Keele, 3 September 2004.

On the Air. The script of a feature broadcast at 21.30 on BBC Radio 3 on 13 June 2004.

Volts From The Blue. A talk given at the day conference Electra: Electricity in Culture at the Royal Institution, 22 May 2004.

Windbags and Skinsongs. A chapter written for The Book of Skin, and given, in compressed form, as a lecture at the conference Skin: texture/textuality/word/image at the Institute of English Studies, 14 April 2004.

Building Breathing Space. A lecture given at the Bartlett School of Architecture, 2 March 2004.

Incidents of the Breath: In Pneumatic and Electric Ventriloquisms. A lecture given in the series ‘Artificial Others: Lectures on Ventriloquism and Automata’ at the Ruskin School of Art and Drawing, Oxford, 17 February 2004.

The Vapours. A paper given at Queen Mary, University of London, 10 December 2003.

Steam Radio: On Theatre’s Thin Air. A paper given at the London Theatre Seminar, 27 October 2003.

Modernism in Midair. A lecture given at the fifth Modernist Studies Association conference, Birmingham UK, 25 September 2003.

An Air That Kills: A Familiar History of Poison Gas. A paper given at the Death By Technology conference, Birkbeck College, 30 May 2003.

Beckett’s Atmospheres. A paper given at the ‘After Beckett/Après Beckett’ conference, Sydney, January 2003.

S m o g. A talk broadcast in BBC’s Nightwaves, 2 December 2002, fifty years after the London’s Great Smog of 1952. [ listen]

Oxygen Debt: Little Dorrit‘s Pneumatics. A lecture given at the Birkbeck Little Dorrit Day, 28 September 2002.