Geography
Derek McCormack, Professor, Geography, University of Oxford, United-Kingdom
I am a professor of cultural geography with interests in performance, affect, and moving bodies. When I first encountered cultural geography as an MSc student in the United States the primary focus of that subdiscipline was on the problems and promise of representation. For the most part cultural geographers at the time were interested in interrogating critically the relation between representation and the contested meanings of spaces and places. For me, exposure to three inter-related strands of thinking shifted this emphasis. The first was known as non-representational theory, associated most closely with the work of Nigel Thrift. The second was the emergence of an interest by geographers and others in affect and emotion. And the third was a greater interest in materiality as something that is irreducible to objects. When I first began thinking about atmosphere it offered a concept for linking these strands of thinking in a distinctively spatiotemporal way. Atmosphere suggested a spacetime excessive of representation, palpable if not tangible, and possessed of a materiality that differed from that of an artefact but which had just as much force – at least potentially. Given this, it is not hard to see how atmosphere has become such an important part of the conceptual vocabulary of a post-representational cultural geography.
My particular interest in the concept of atmosphere emerged from while also helping me to think about two issues. The first is the generative relation between moving bodies and spaces. There are lots of interesting connections to be made here with elements of scenography and choreography. The former, for instance, involves generating, modifying, and dampening the atmospheres in relation to which bodies move. For a cultural geographer the important point here is that moving bodies are generative of atmospheres at the same time as they can be moved by atmospheres. Foregrounding this relation provides a way of thinking about the politics of immersion and influence. It also offers a reminder that atmosphere is not just an analytic concept – atmospheres also emerge in the process of practices including thinking, working, dancing, walking, and writing.
Second, atmosphere also became a concept that helped me link the affective and the meteorological. That is, atmosphere is not only a way of thinking about the feel of spacetime. It is also a way of connecting the feel of spacetime to the properties of the gases in which feeling bodies are immersed and of which they partake through processes like breathing. This encouraged me to avoid thinking of bodies as objects immersed in a kind of fluid – the relation between bodies and atmospheres is a relation between multiple processes. Importantly, this applies as much to non-human bodies as it does to human bodies.
I still use and think with the concept of atmosphere while also wondering about its limits. In some ways I now find atmosphere to be a little bit like the concept of rhythm as it figures, for instance, in the work of figures like Lefebvre. By this I mean that once you go looking for it you find it everywhere. This is both part of the allure of atmosphere and something that gives me pause. Merely pointing out that atmospheres exist, or that they are part of the experience of worlds is not enough. What matters is the difference that they make, the forces they exert, the constraints they impose. What matters is how they draw bodies in, enlivening and thickening spacetime. And, of course, how they can also repel, suffocate, and exhaust.
Cite this item: Derek McCormack, “Atmosphere / Ambiance”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177545
Sociology
Jean-Paul Thibaud, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, AAU CRESSON, Grenoble, France
I am a research researcher at the CNRS with the UMR (Unité Mixte de Recherche) Ambiances Architectures Urbanities, CRESSON team in Grenoble. The laboratory in which I conduct my research has developed to a great extent around the thematic of architectural and urban ambiances.
I became interested in the notion of ambiance after having worked on the question of ordinary sound experience and that of public urban spaces. It was then a question of pursuing work dealing with the sensorial urban experience by no longer limiting my to sonic register alone.
The notion of ambiance has contributed to the powerful upswing of the sensorial domain in research and contemporary creations. (We can specifically refer to The International Ambiance Network – www.ambiance.net). It paves the way for a situated, embodied, shared and enacted conception of the sensorial world. With ambiance, it is not simply a matter of perceiving a landscape or measuring an environment, but of feeling situations, of generating site specific experiences and of discovering together the sensuous contexture of social life. That is to say that ambiance is fundamentally by nature multi-sensorial, convoking all modes of perception (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, movement…). It is also a matter of asserting the pathic, affective and pre-reflexive dimension constitutive of every ambiance.
Three points might be retained from the notion of ambiance. Firstly, as we understand it at CRESSON, an ambiance is always related to a precise situation, a material framework or a constructed environment. We like to talk about “architectural and urban ambiance” to signify the anchoring of all ambiance in a concrete space-time. But we must clarify that an ambiance cannot in any case be reduced to an objective physical environment, nor for that matter to a subjective individual state. One of the interests of the concept of ambiance is precisely that of going beyond the classical opposition between the sensing subject and the sensed object, focusing instead on that which sets the situational tone and operates through a given milieu. Secondly, ambiance situates itself at the interface of research and design. It allows us to conduct the investigation just as much as it allows us to execute the project, to deconstruct the sensorial city (heuristic power) as much as to shape it (operative power). In short, it functions both as an analyzer and an operator of an ecology of the senses. Thirdly, if the ambiance occupies a particular space in the work of the sensorial world it is because it engages a strong notion of the sensory. Ambiance is not a sensorial domain among others but instead that by which the world becomes sensorial. It is therefore not an object of perception – as, for example, a performance or a landscape might be – but the condition of perception itself. In other words, we do not, strictly speaking, perceive ambiance; we perceive according to it. Ambiance is that which renders perception possible, that from which we perceive, that which brings the sensory into existence. As an example, I don’t see a square in the same way when it is bathed in dazzling light or when it is enveloped in a thick fog. Let us add that the ambient domain is not an isolated or autonomous domain, independent of social practices. Quite the contrary, all ambient stagings presuppose resident performances that activate and actualize the environment’s resources. Ambiance is as such, the ultimate training site of our perceptual habits, the activation site of our sensorimotor frameworks, and the activation site of our socio-aesthetic relationship to the world.
My work has sought to develop in particular a pragmatic approach (complementary in this to a phenomenological approach more widely diffused and at the center of the concept), based on diverse and varied terrain surveys that put it to the empirical test (working for example on climate imbalance, a contaminated district in Brazil, urban oases in the Maghreb, underground public spaces, walking in town). The question I pose is thus not simply “what is an ambiance?” but “what does it permit us to do, perceive, feel, share and think?” In this regard, I have tried to show that ambiance can be considered an art of impregnation.
Cite this item: Jean-Paul Thibaud, “Atmosphere / Ambiance”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177545
