This was an extremely rich seminar, in many different dimensions—conceptual, sensorial, methodological—in ways that make it impossible for me to do justice to it in the short time I have to make this presentation. I therefore beg my seminar colleagues to complement this presentation in the discussion time we should have afterwards, filling the gaps they perceive in my report.

The activities of the seminar combined a series of methods and strategies for engagement with the themes to be discussed: methods such as meditation practices; interactive games in which participants got to know each other and explored the physical and natural environments of the room in which the seminar took place and the garden immediately adjacent to it; a presentation about pollution in the Tibetan Plateau, from the perspective of the atmospheric sciences; an analysis of the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and its implications for the question of the technosphere; a discussion of artist Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene project—and we had the privilege and the honor of having his direct participation in the seminar; and group work followed by class debate.

The program of the seminar announced that a “growing number of human and nonhuman entities are being locked into the technosphere, which is itself locked into an accelerating exploitation of fossil fuels and other material resources, and depends on particular forms of knowledge production.” The technosphere is here defined as “an assemblage of technical, biotic, and abiotic entities that has emerged on a given planet and has acquired a degree of autopoietic autonomy from other planetary subsystems.” The main goals of the seminar are then to address the questions: “Is a different kind of technosphere possible?”; “What forms of knowledge might a different technosphere require and engender?”

A basic premise of the debate is the idea that “[t]he emergence of this sphere is based on a particular ‘thermodynamic imaginary’ and is solidified by certain patterns of knowledge production, which are neither permanent nor inflexible.” Saraceno’s Aerocene project was chosen by the conveners to function as the main stimulus for debate, and at the same time it was a platform for concept development and experimentation. The Aerocene project consists in the creation of sculptures in the form of balloons or spheres, using simple materials such as plastic bags and tape, that are capable of floating in the atmosphere with no chemical propellant.

In November 2015, in White Sand Dunes, New Mexico, with an aerocene sculpture, Saraceno produced the first fully certified solar flight, lifting human passengers for over three hours, without any form of fuel other than sunlight. The flight of the aerocene is based on the physical principle of buoyancy, defined as an “upward force exerted by a fluid that opposes the weight of an immersed object.” As sun radiation heats the surface of the aerocene, the density of the air inside it decreases, its volume increases, and buoyancy pushes it upwards. It functions exactly as a hot air balloon, except for the absence of any source of energy other than sun radiation.

The fact that sun radiation alone can lift an adult person is already provoking enough. Yet Saraceno has been exploring the possibilities of his creation in a number of interesting innovative ways, going from the use of the balloons in citizen science projects monitoring the atmosphere to conversations with scientists at MIT in order to explore the technological possibilities of the aerocene. According to Saraceno, a balloon with a diameter of 1.6 kilometers is capable of lifting over 600 tons of weight with a difference of temperature between the inside and outside air of just one degree Celsius. Just having people breathing inside it would make it fly. Heavy things can, and do, fly, says Saraceno. A cumulus cloud often weighs as much as 60 elephants. This fact led him, in the words of Sasha Engelmann, to “dream with cloud cities.”

According to Saraceno, the “Aerocene holds a message of simplicity, creativity, and cooperation for a world of tumultuous geopolitical relations, reminding us of our symbiotic relationship with the Earth and all its species.” In our seminar, we had the opportunity to unpack the supposed material simplicity of the aerocene and reveal its incredible rich and complex poetic and philosophic potential. Four things were syntagmatically aligned, bringing to the surface, although not without some turbulence, the dimension of the problem that the conveners of the seminar nicely called the “thermodynamic imaginary.” These four things were as follows:

1. The creative re-enactment of the Tapa Wanka Yap or Throwing the Ball ritual of the Lakota Nation, as the very first activity of the seminar, led by Janot Mendler de Suarez. This is a ritual in which the relationship between the people and the universe is symbolically established through processes of giving and retribution.
2. The discussion of aerosols, pollution, the Tibet Plateau, and the deeply engrained patterns of perception about the atmosphere, presented by Zoe Lucia Lüthi. Zoe also led short meditation sessions during the seminar.
3. The presentation on Alfred North Whitehead’s criticism of the concept of “bifurcation of nature,” which produced a divorce between mind and matter in Western scientific thought, by Melanie Sehgal.
4. The onto-aesthetical subversion introduced by the Aerocene, presented by Sasha Engelmann and by Tomás Saraceno himself. The use of the expression “onto-aesthetical subversion” is part of the conceptual gymnastics put in place in the collective attempt to construct the instruments for the constitution of new forms of embodiment and new habits of thought, as two sides of the same existential coin, more attuned with the thermodynamic imaginative requirements for working (with) the technosphere in the context of the Anthropocene.

Interestingly, one dimension of the thermodynamic imaginaries we are trying to surpass unexpectedly presented itself and frustrated what was perhaps the most exciting activity of the seminar: the launching of aerocene sculptures at Tempelhof airfield, at the dawn of Monday, April 18. Saraceno and his team had brought two balloons to the field. The meteorological conditions were just perfect: clear skies and the absence of wind. After a bit more than an hour and a half of sunlight warming, the aerocenes started to lift—spectacularly—above the ground. A few minutes later, two cars from the private security company that oversees the field appeared, asking for “permits.” That was the end of the launch.

In the last activity of the seminar, the class was divided into four groups, each with the mission of envisaging strategies for bringing about transformations in the thermodynamic imagination that we believe would be required for constituting a better future. Interestingly, two of the keywords of the seminar, embodiment and habits of thought, were present in one way or another in the proposals of all four groups.

Group one facilitated a walking experience derived from the theater practice called “Walk the Space.” To avoid being overly prescriptive or directive, participants were given minimal instructions on how to engage the site where the walk would occur (in the garden adjacent to the classroom); they were left primarily with the knowledge that the walk would last no more than four minutes and participants were invited to evoke notice, attunement, curiosity, and awareness as they mobilized. This exercise was followed by an analysis of people’s perceptions of how the walking process took shape, with responses considering the assumed, unspoken rules of the exercise and individuals’ choices to adhere to or subvert those rules. The activity was inspired partly by Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening practice, and one of the conclusions reached by the group was that social interaction patterns necessarily respond to and incorporate the architecture and entities of the space. The space, or air, between individuals then reveals itself as something full, and not empty.

Group two engaged in an activity in which the goal was an increase in the awareness of one’s surroundings, through the direct engagement of our senses with the environment. Group members explored the Tiergarten; it seems that some members of the group ate flowers in natura. The group also explored the practice of geocaching, the establishment of networks of impersonal exchange of goods and narratives.

Group three proposed an exploration of novel forms of conceptualizing death in the context of the Anthropocene, against a background of the creation of relations of responsibility and reciprocity towards other forms of life. The group proposed thought experiments such as the creation of a dataset of a dying world; visualization mechanisms that would enable each individual to see how many and which living beings have to die for each one of us to remain alive; and the provocative and subversive exploration of mechanisms such as carbon offset markets, substituting carbon for life—a death offset market in which relations would never be perfectly commensurable, and participants would have to accommodate that.

Group four worked on the construction of strategies for integrating the aerocene into local forms of knowledge of the environment in Tanzania and India, through the constitution of what Mikey Glantz terms “useful and usable knowledge.” The target audience in India, in the imagined scheme, would be children and university students. Sensibilities and perception would be worked out through a combination of scientific knowledge and local expressive genres such as dance and music, art projects, etc. In Tanzania, the aerocene device would be part of the training of youth mobilizers who connect international development organizations with local communities. The aerocene would also be a tool for discussing the heritage of colonialism in the history of science.

As convener Bronislaw Szerszynski nicely put it at the end of the activities of the seminar, the stream constituted by our discussions, games, and conceptual and material experimentations resulted in a delta, where the engagement and the energy of the group spread into a number of different directions, greatly enlarging the total potential fertility of the existential fields of which we are part, and in which the seeds deposited by this seminar will certainly flourish.