« Air supplies human and non-human life forms with vital oxygen and provides non-stop access to data necessary for sustaining
life. But because air already played an important role in communication processes long before human life existed, taking an anthropocentric perspective when considering air would be extremely limiting.
Furthermore, on a local and global level, air as medium of communication becomes information in its own right. For all life forms it then holds good that living in and through air equals processing information; wind carries messages of desire and danger that plants and animals exchange along with data such as those electromagnetic waves, sound waves and natural radiation that are produced by organic and non-organic elements of the environment but are not directed to a specific addressee. In this long history of airborne data, mobile electronic technologies, albeit a very recent phenomenon, are doubtlessly overwhelming
human-machine contributions to this archaic system of communicating which, through them, has not become obsolete, but rather immensely enriched. Human users constantly develop new ways of using air in order to emit, receive (extract) and process information that is already circulating around us. Like all other air users, we contribute to the atmosphere through the vital respiratory cycle, but unlike nonhuman users, we saturate air with electronic data, shaping the air space not only on a physical, but also on the mental level… »
Contributo di
Steven Connor