Rescaling the Weather Experience: From an Object of Aesthetics to a Matter of Concern

Abstract

This paper analyses the cluster of aesthetic features involved in the common experience of the weather. Perceptual features (framelessness, chromatics, texture, synaesthesia, ephemerality, proteism) are accompanied by ‘atmospheric’ moods that are irreducible to physiological well-being. Representation and imagination reach their limits due to the more-than-human spatiotemporal scale of the atmosphere. Finally, some ‘transaesthetic’ aspects include the agency of an active matter and the longing for an elemental alterity. The aesthetics of the weather has to account for the interdependence between aesthetic and ethical values, between bodily engagement and appropriate knowledge, individual contemplation and social commitment, in order to develop ecological responsibility.

Keywords

Aesthetics weather atmosphere phenomenology atmospheric sciences

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