Aerocene is an interdisciplinary artistic community that seeks to devise new modes of sensitivity, reactivating a common imaginary towards an ethical collaboration with the environment and the atmosphere, free from carbon emissions. As an ever growing research and experiemntal practice, Aerocene is open-source and collaborative. It consists of a dedicated and diverse global community of practitioners who collaborate to promote and enact envitomental awareness and atmospheric sensing experiments, imagining new infrastructures of planetary mobility and ethics.
By collaboratively developing, testing and launching aerosolar sculptures, Aerocene seeks to open up the imagination towards an emergent cloudscape, un-tethering a new era of planetary attunement, restoring the thermodynamic balance of the Earth, free from borders, free from fossil fuels.
The launch pad towards this new epoch is the aerosolar sculpture, a Do-It-Together (DIT) vessel to enter the aerial, whose only engine is the air and the heat of the Sun. It becomes buoyant as a result of the temperature differentials between the air masses inside and outside the aerosolar balloon, anywhere from 2 degrees up, without using any fossil fuels, helium, hydrogen, solar panels or batteries.
Various sculptures and tools have been invented, tested, improved, and world records broken in a move towards this collective vision developed by the Aerocene global community of artists, geographers, philosophers, thinkers, scientists, explorers, balloonists, technologists and enthusiasts.
In a world of tumultuous geopolitical relations, Aerocene communicates a message of simplicity, reminding us that the air -as “suprastate”- belongs to everyone and should not depend on any type of sovereignty. It imagines a new infrastructure, which challenges and redefines a supranational right to mobility, re-examining freedom of movement between countries and reversing the extractive approach humans have developed toward the planet. This could be achieved by encouraging a bottom-up, participatory approach to policy making about the air, and through the activity of international community-building carried out by the Aerocene Foundation.
Aerocene emerged through Museo Aero Solar in 2007, a community practice forming through cooperation and the simple acts of reusing plastic bags. A flying museum, an aerosolar sculpture, and a container for and of collaborative endeavours, Museo Aero Solar continues to float around the Planet. Where will it land next?
While fossil fuel enterprises attempt to colonize other planets, the very same interface between us, the Sun and the atmosphere – the air – continues to be compromised.
Carbon emissions fill the air, invisible radio waves develop in a hegemonic algorithm of finance, particulate matter floats inside our lungs.
Can you imagine how would breathing feel in a post fossil fuel economy, and what is our response-ability?
How do we challenge geopolitical borders in an age of climate inequality?
using no other resources than the Sun
White Sands, New Mexico, 2015
The Aerocene Backpack is your personal tool for solar-powered atmospheric exploration: a tethered-flight starter kit that offers a new way to sense the environment.
The Backpack is designed to engage participants in thinking-through-making activity, stimulating imagination and creativity, and imparts information about solar balloon flight, thermodynamic physics, meteorological science, and art practices.
The Aerosolar sculpture enclosed in the portable backpack is everything you need to float and start sensing the skies using the heat from the Sun, and floating without burning fossil fuels, helium, and other rare gases.
The kit-to-float allows participants to draw signatures in, of and with the air, declaring independence from carbon emissions.
The Aerocene Backpack is currently being tested and developed by a passionate global community of artists, geographers, philosophers, thinkers, speculative scientists, explorers, balloonists, and technologists, and other enthusiasts.
Have you floated with the Backpack? Share your experience with us! Write to info@aerocene.org.
Aerocene community proposed to develop some specific actions in Ansenuza. The focus was the study and observation of birds and strengthening Ansenuza environment as a continental sanctuary for migration birds.
Ally Bisshop, Saverio Contini, Dario Lagana, Alice Lamperti, Andrea Familari, Charles Gonzalez, Jasper Humpert, Sarah Kisner, Patrick Reddy, Cordelia Soender, Zaida Violan, Erik Vogler
Join Aerocene! On 24th October at 10:30 am, Aerocene Community will reunite in São Paulo for a collective action supporting
Alice Lamperti, Roxanne Mackie, Erik Vogler
Sasha Engelmann
Camille Valenzuela, Maxi Laina, Mirko Laina, Olivia Laina, Gabi Sorbi, Amalia Boselli, Joaquin Ezcurra
Tomás Saraceno
Want to add your launch or innovation to this page? Let us know! Write to us at info@aerocene.org.
‘Air Crafted Architecture’ — Pierre Chabard
‘Saraceno’s Model of Models: The Magnificence of Aerocene’ — Kiel Moe
‘High Altitude, Low Opening (H.A.L.O.)’ — Sanford Kwinter
‘The fixed and flowing air’ — Oliver Morton
‘On the Political Influence of the Sun’ — Boris Groys
‘Piloting the Aerocene’ — Derek McCormack
‘I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone*’ — Olivier Michelon
‘Tianhe 天河区: Parables of the Celestial River — Jol Thomson and Sasha Engelmann
High Altitude, Low Opening (H.A.L.O.)[1] Three–dimensional warfare is said to have begun in China in the first years of the Common Era with the practice
How to grasp, in feeling as much as in thought, the promise of new forms of life in the air? This question, and the promise
‘Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world; we are drifting together toward the noise and
Museo Aero Solar, already presented in more than 20 locations worldwide since its start in spring 2007, is a global collective. One of its initiators,
500 years ago the people of Louth, a prosperous market town in east England, conquered the sky. At the west end of their church, St
Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene is astonishing for many reasons. Foremost is the degree to which his experiment manifests the salient principle of thermodynamics as the motor
* from a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Cloud’ (1820) In 2014, on the occasion of the exhibition “The Anthropocene Monument”, initiated by
During the period of modernity we got accustomed to the understanding of the human beings as determined by the social milieu in which they live,
