The Dwelling of Air: Making and Launching Solar Balloons

In this paper, written with Sasha Engelmann, Dr Bronislaw Szerszynski uses the solar balloon as a philosophical device for exploring air as element. A solar balloon is a balloon that is lifted and animated when it and its contained air are warmed by the sun. Through a phenomenological account of a 24-hour solar-balloon-making workshop with the artist Tomas Saraceno, he explores the materiality, technicity and sociality of balloon-making and balloon repair, balloon-launching and balloon-tracking. He shows how the aerostat demonstrates how Being appears not in the lichtung, the empty clearing of Heidegger's Dasein, but in the maternal embrace of "air, this there, which gives itself boundlessly and without demonstration, ever unfurled-unfurling, and in which everything will come to presence and into relation (Irigaray 1999), in an atmosphere that is both material and effectual (Infold forthcoming). The surprising event of aerostatic being enables us not only to feel the wind, but to join with it, as we travel with the eye and the mind, or with our won bodies, on the ground, or up in the air. By making, filling, launching and tracking a solar balloon we see the air's own powers made explicit. The solar balloon in its motion makes visible the gradients, motions and torsions that together make up air as element—the orderly and the chaotic, the gently and the violent, that are all at once accidental and essential to its being. In air, "the gods pass us by, weightless, insubstantial, flanking non-existence, evanescent spirits; the least wrinkle in the air will chase them away" (Serres 2008). Yet a solar balloon, if cared for, readily transmits the wrinkles and turbulence of air to human hands and bodies. Through the act of bringing a solar balloon to aerostatic life, human and non-human bodies can become attuned and sensitive to each other (Despret 2004), and to the enfolding element. But the solar balloon, the most fragile of balloons in its coming into being, also enables us to think not just about our relation to the balloon and to the air, but also the air's relation to itself, and to the objects that are immersed within it.