High Altitude, Low Opening (H.A.L.O.) — Sanford Kwinter
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 of manned flight
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FREE FROM BORDERS, FREE FROM FOSSIL FUELS
Aerocene is on, with and for the air.
As an ever growing research and experimental practice, Aerocene is open-source and collaborative. It consists of a dedicated and diverse global community of practitioners who collaborate to promote and enact environmental 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.
Who makes Aerocene?
We are very honoured to work with many brilliant people around the world. Find out more about the people who have contributed to the Aerocene movement.
Aerocene is an interdisciplinary 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.
AEROCENE MANIFESTO:
aeronauts unite!
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?
HOW TO BECOME AEROSOLAR
and float with the air
Aerosolar
/ˈeə.rə.sɒl.lər/
Adjective. Noun.
Of the Sun and the winds.
The capacity to harness the energy of the Sun in ways that make moving with, and relating to, the ocean of air self-sustaining.
An envelope’s ability to gain buoyancy; a contained body of air heated by direct solar radiation, achieving lower density than the air outside of it to float in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
The desire for futurity expressed in the rejection of fossil fuels and the extractive practices and relations of the industrial-colonial model, embodied in the will to sense and collaborate with the atmosphere and all immersed in its elemental milieu.
An ethical principle of an ecology of practices cultivated by the Aerocene Community, developed through the Archimedes principle established in c. 250 BCE by Archimedes of Syracuse, fundamental to the fluid dynamics of the laws of physics.
DIVE INTO THE AEROCENE LIBRARY
for a common shared knowledge
Aerocene. Movements for the Air | Munich Landing, 2020
Aerocene Newspaper | COP21, 2015
Aerocene Reader | Exhibition Road, 2016
READ FURTHER INTO THE INSIGHTS OF AEROCENE CONTRIBUTORS
Saraceno’s Model of Models: The Magnificence of Aerocene — Kiel Moe
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 of its operation:
Air Crafted Architecture — Pierre Chabard
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, Tomás Saraceno, defines
Up — Bronislaw Szerszynski
As society struggles to come to terms with the implications of antropogenic climate change, it is becoming increasingly clear that any adequate response will require not just more
The fixed and flowing air — Oliver Morton
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 James’s, they built
On the Political Influence of the Sun — Boris Groys
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, as knots in
HISTORY OF SOLAR BALLOONING
learn from the past to unravel different futures
Throughout history, humanity has rehearsed with lighter-than-air vehicles aiming for a different way to move through and with the air, only with the power of the sun.
Presented here are various attempts of solar flight, undertaken by people whose types of movements into the atmosphere have become marginalised, and rendered invisible under the hegemony of the fossil fuel regime.
AEROCENE TIMELINE
the milestones of a 20 years long dream
Aerocene, as a vision, starts to form
Museo Aero Solar community emerges while at the same time Tomás Saraceno flies in his first tethered human flight, aptly named 59 steps to be on air by sun power.
Poetic Cosmos of the Breath - a solar dome of around 60 m diameter, made of thin iridescent foil, lifted by the sun, Gunpowder Park, London, UK
French philosopher Bruno Latour joins Saraceno’s journey towards Aerocene; Museo Aero Solar: Territoria 4: il grande balzo, a giant Museo Aero Solar flew on air in Prato, IT
2010 During his residency at the Atelier Calder in Saché, France in 2010, Tomás Saraceno rose carried by an aerosolar sculpture using only the heat of the sun.
After the success, during a festival at the Centro Cultural España Córdoba, Saraceno himself flew up into the air attached to an uncertified, tethered sculpture. When landing the artist broke his back. Two surgeries later, it became clear that a safer, certified system of construction would need to be devised for any future flights.
The Float Predictor started as a collaborative project with Aerocene community members, artist Tomás Saraceno and meteorologist Lodovica Illari at the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); together with the support of Leila Kinney from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST).
The Aerocene community starts to grow;
Bruno Latour invites Saraceno to present Museo Aero Solar and Aerocene to The Anthropocene Monument project, Toulouse, FRA.
Museo Aero Solar is presented in the frame of Development & Climate Days, Red Cross Climate Conference with Pablo Suarez, Lima, PR and
Saraceno's residency at the French Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) begins. Aerocene sculptures are an homage to scientific experiments that the CNES initiated in the late 1970s, launching infrared radiation balloons (Montgolfière InfraRouge – MIR).
Deep Space - First ever fully-solar Human Tethered Flight in White Sands, NM, USA takes place. The Aerocene Float Predictor continues its development as a web program that gives access to virtual flights and allows millions to virtually travel the planet, share experiences, experiments and flight data, all from the premise of travelling around the earth, free from borders, free from fossil fuels.
During the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP21 in Paris, Saraceno launched the Aerocene Foundation, and he exhibited two giant spherical flying sculptures at the Grand Palais during the summit.
Aerocene Gemini - the First unmanned Aerosolar Free Flight, is launched from Schönfeld, Berlin and landed in Biskupiec, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Poland.
Aerosolar Journeys - Tethered Flight Performances takes place in the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, in conjunction with the exhibition 163,000 Light Years, MARCO, MX.
Aerocene Gemini - the First unmanned Aerosolar Free Flight, is launched from Schönfeld, Berlin and landed in Biskupiec, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Poland.
Aerosolar Journeys - Tethered Flight Performances takes place in the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia , ARG, in conjunction with the exhibition 163,000 Light Years, MARCO, MX.
Tomás Saraceno is invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos twice, presenting Aerocene mobility. Aerocene has been endorsed by Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican environmentalist who drafted the Paris Climate Accord as well as by then U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, SW;
Tomás Saraceno presents Aerocene at TedTalk - Would you live in a floating city in the sky?
The performative flight Tata Inti –father sun– takes place. A collective Performance in which multiple, tethered aerosolar sculptures drew aeroglyphs with the air, from the Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, ARG
TEN-T - Highest manned fully-solar Tethered Flight achieved during Aerocene presentation at the European Commission Biennial conference on Transportation and Mobility, embracing an invitation from the by then European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc, Ljubljana, SLO; during the symposium days of ON AIR Live with... - Successful experiment with reflective surface enhancing the lift of the manned fully-solar Tethered Flight, achieved during ON AIR Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno, Paris, FRA;
During the MIT Science festival - Citizen Science - Aerocene Sculpture Performance and Interactive Display Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
2019 Munich Landing...Aerocene Festival - Manned Tethered Flight Test, Aerosolar Pilot Courses and unmanned Free Flight achieved during Aerocene Festival, Munich, DEU
FLY WITH AEROCENE PACHA - On 28th January 2020, in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina, the artist Tomás Saraceno launched Fly with Aerocene Pacha, a huge, balloon-like flying sculpture. For the first time in history, a human being floated into the sky with only the warmth of the sun and the air we all breathe, without fossil fuels, solar panels, lithium batteries or helium. A synthesis of art, science and environmental activism, and the culmination of over 20 years of experimental, collaborative work, Fly with Aerocene Pacha sets 32 world records for the first fully solar, human free flight, certified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).
