S2E7 Oxygen
Transcript
JG: Jennifer Gutman
LK: Lutz Koepnick
TH: Tori Hoover
EV: Emma Vendetta
ML: Maren Loveland
MM: Meredith Malone
SS = Santiago Sierra
TC: Ted Chiang
INTRODUCTION
JG:
Hey Lutz, let me ask you something: what’s your favorite number?
LK:
Hm. I think I have different ones, in different contexts.
JG:
For instance?
LK:
One is certainly number 10.
JG:
10? Why 10?
LK:
It’s often the number reserved for the critical playmaker in soccer, the magician who operates between the lines. Leo Messi and Mbappe and Pele, Zidane and Maradona, and more recently Florian Wirtz.
JG:
You should know that soccer isn’t really my thing.
LK:
That’s a big problem, Jen. But let’s not get down that road. What’s your, your favorite or lucky number.
JG:
So, I have a theory that might sound a little crazy: I think 21 is the most important number. The one that holds everything together.
LK:
21? Why 21?
JG:
Guess.
LK:
Is it because 21 is the legal drinking age?
JG:
Nope.
LK:
Hm. Let’s try again: because that’s the number of points you need to win a set in table tennis or volleyball?
JG:
That stopped long before my time. I think it’s 25 in volleyball now, and 11 in table tennis.
LK:
Ouch. How about: Because numerologists, if I am not mistaken, think of it as being associated with creativity and independence, with personal growth.
JG:
Honestly I didn’t even know that. But it might be fitting.
LK:
I think I give up. No idea.
JG:
Well, did you know that our air, our atmosphere, needs an oxygen level of 21% in order to enable the lives of plants, animals, and humans? To me, 21 is all about life, life as we know it. 21 is all about habitability. That’s why I love it.
LK:
That’s beautiful. You know, in our episode on Breath, we heard quite a bit about a composition for 12 flutes called “Oxygen” by Julia Wolfe. It was written in response to the pandemic, to the shortness of breath we as individuals and as a society experienced at the time.
JG:
Not to mention the shortness of breath that those with long COVID are still experiencing. I think it’s safe to say that oxygen, or the lack thereof, remains on many people’s minds. Especially those of artists and filmmakers.
LK:
True. A while back, I read this recent German sci-fi novel called Oxygen, by the writer Andreas Brandhorst. It’s a “Klimathriller,” as it says on the cover, and it tells the story of people living in a world in which, due to some previous climate engineering projects, land and sea-based plants no longer do their job of photosynthesis. The novel offers a terrifying vision: People worldwide run out of breathable oxygen. They literally become breathless, and they die by the billions before some scientists eventually come up with a way to reboot the planet’s habitability.
JG:
Perhaps less literal, more metaphorical, is the French science-fiction film also called Oxygene. It’s all about a person who wakes up in a tiny cryogenic chamber, all by herself, unable to communicate with the outside except with some kind of artificial intelligence. She has no clue where she is, or why she’s there. What is clear, however, is that the chamber’s oxygen level is slowly but surely decreasing.
LK:
Sounds like everyone’s worst nightmare.
JG:
It’s a true horror film, even if throughout most of the movie we never really leave the chamber. I guess that’s the point, though, right? That claustrophobic technique makes it hard for us to breathe, too.
LK:
Outside of science fiction, though, breathlessness often happens in the realm of the underprivileged, right? Asthma rates, for instance, are higher in areas with more pollution – which are usually also less-wealthy zip codes.
JG:
And then, on the other hand, you have oxygen therapy, the inhalation of so-called “pure oxygen,” which is currently a fad among the ultra-wealthy.
LK:
With rather ambiguous health benefits, though. Because it turns out that too much oxygen is just as bad for us as too little. If you ask me, oxygen therapy is its own kind of horror film – unless of course you need to boost intake levels during an emergency.
JG:
And so it all comes back to 21! Just like I said.
LK:
I guess today’s episode of Art of Interference is all about the power of 21, then—what climate change does to our atmosphere’s oxygen level and how different artists address this in their work. Today’s focus is on a project from Spanish artist Santiago Sierra called 52 Canvases. It was recently shown in St. Louis, and we’ll talk with curator Meredith Malone about the issues it raised.
JG:
After that, we’ll return to science fiction to discuss Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.” It’s a short story that I think de-familiarizes our relationship with oxygen in interesting, terrifying, and oddly hopeful ways.
LK:
It was on numerous best ten of the year lists when it was initially published, right? And Barack Obama included the volume that included the story in his personal must-read selection in summer 2019. An illuminating window onto the future.
JG:
Right. But like a lot of sci-fi, “Exhalation” is less about the imagined future that comprises its setting and more about anxieties and hopes of the present, in this case how to sustain the habitability of planet Earth the more we deplete its oxygen levels.
LK:
To ensure the life-granting power of 21.
JG:
Yeah. And what your number 10s need to captivate fans with their magic.
OPENING CREDITS
TH:
From Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, this is “Art of Interference”: A podcast about creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we talk with artists and experts who work at the intersection of nature, technology, and science today. Today’s episode is hosted by Jennifer Gutman and Lutz Koepnick.
PART 1
SS [ML voiceover]:
Let’s say that I start with a very formal and minimal language with respect to art. Not a way of thinking about art, not with an activity of manual skill or manufacturing skill, but with an intellectual activity, an activity where what is being done, what is being expressed, what is being developed, is a form of free thought.
LK:
This is Santiago Sierra. Born in 1966 in Madrid, Spain, Sierra is well known as a unique provocateur. His installations know no taboos. His performances challenge all conventions. Art, for him, is not about making objects. Instead, it is about asking hard questions. It is what happens when we practice free thought in its most radical form. Sierra’s work is simultaneously minimalist and maximalist. Art for him by nature is all about social activism. Here’s how a Tate Museum feature in 2018 described his work:
Tate Shots:
Almost everything Sierra does is designed at some level to provoke, and unsurprisingly, he’s been accused of being exploitative. In the past, he’s paid illegal street vendors in Venice, many of them Africans, $60 to have their hair bleached blonde. He’s piped exhaust fumes from cars into a former synagogue in a small town in Germany. People could only enter wearing breathing apparatus and accompanied by a fireman. In 2004, Sierra sprayed a number of Iraqi volunteers with quick setting polyurethane foam. The husk-like impressions left behind immediately conjured images of hooded torture victims in Abu Ghraib.
LK:
Sierra’s interventions are designed to step on your toes. He wants to agitate your moral compass. But in one of his more recent projects, 52 Canvases, Sierra strikes a slightly different tone. The project visualizes the toxic nature of contemporary urban life—how the lack of breathable air (namely, oxygen) will injure bodies and minds in a far more tangible way than art might. At first glance, the work may seem simple: in 2019, Sierra exposed 52 square canvases to the air of Mexico City. Their surface was covered with adhesive lacquer, enabling them to gather whatever particles and harmful gases would circulate in the air. Over the period of one year, he removed one canvas each week from the group, producing a sort of time-lapse document. While the first canvas shows little impact and remains fairly white in color, the final canvas is nearly black; it reveals the signatures of ozone and other greenhouse gases, as well as all kinds of muck that enter our lungs, typically without our knowledge. Either hung in a series or as a grid, Sierra’s 52 canvases are at once utterly abstract and shockingly concrete. Their distinct gradations ask us to confront the way our modern world degrades the air we require to sustain life on Earth.
In the spring of 2024, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis exhibited 52 Canvases as part of a new series on art and our climate crises.
MM:
My name is Meredith Malone. I’m curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. I’ve been a curator here for about 17 years now.
LK:
I had the opportunity to speak to Meredith a few months ago. I wanted to ask her about the show, and about how Sierra’s work engages the formal language of art to engage viewers in a conversation about climate change.
LK:
52 Canvases Exposed to Mexico City’s Air is exactly what the title promises, it’s 52 canvases that have been exposed to Mexico City’s, foul air and foul light over different periods of time. What exactly do you actually see on those canvases when you step up close?
MM:
It’s arranged on a very large wall in our atrium space. So the wall is about 50 feet long and the ceiling really goes up to about 25 feet high. This work is arranged in a very large grid. There’s four rows that are stacked from the top to the bottom and about 15 columns across. When you walk in, you can see this kind of beautiful looking ombre effect, right? The way he’s arranged it is the top left is almost a white canvas. So it goes from light on the left side to progressively darker as you move across the grid.
And when you look at it from afar, it does look kind of pleasantly beautiful, right? There’s a sort of gradation of colors, but as soon as you get up closer, you start to see a lot of dirt. There is a lot of texture on the canvases. I think if you just see it in pictures, you really don’t get a sense of exactly how much grit and grime there is. On every single one, you know, there’s what we’re assuming is pigeon feathers on a lot of them. There’s dead bugs on some of them as well. A whole range of kind of muck. It’s really quite gross when you get up real close.
LK:
The title is 52 canvases. It’s not 52 images or 52 paintings. On some level, the process is a little bit like photography. You have a sensitive material on which then the air, and the light can be captured. In your approach to this piece, what do you, what do you call those images, those canvases? Are they paintings? They might almost be films, right? You have 52 shots taken over 52 weeks over a year that are still frames basically animated to some degree. What is the medium of this work?
MM:
I think it’s all of the above, quite honestly. I mean, that’s why it’s such an interesting piece in the end. I think you’re right to bring up photography and cinema. Even like the indexical approach to the whole project is very much creating this time lapse or maybe a time capsule in the way that they’re kind of one after the other definitely has this reference to the cinematic. Now, I should say, this piece was originally made in 2019. He showed it in his gallery in Mexico City. He showed it as one continuous line. It looped around the walls in his gallery, they’re all shown basically like eye height, which for me reiterates that idea of the cinematic, right? That sense of the temporal is very much on display in that. We couldn’t do it like that in our space. It was him who decided exactly the arrangement of how the grid works. And I think the way he did it is really quite ingenious; it creates this pattern across the wall that still has that temporal effect. You see it all at one time instead of walking through. But I do see them as paintings, too. Abstract compositions, ultimately. When you look at them, there is a lot happening on each one. So, I do think that he’s, engaging with that history of photography and cinema, but also with the history of abstraction and painting, as well.
LK:
In the larger arc of this podcast, we work with a lot of artists who don’t just represent climate change that aren’t just trying to find new ways, finding new images to represent things that are happening to us, but that really engage the elements, air, water, ice, as co-maker, as a co-player, as a, as a collaborator in the art in the process and one could say that with regard to this work as well.
MM:
Sure there is this element of collaboration with the elements, right? There’s an element of chance that’s happening here. And I think what Sierra is doing with the grid is an important part of this too, right? So he’s thinking about the minimalist grid, but he’s also very much engaging with practices of conceptual and process art. That idea of creating a system and then implementing that system and then letting this element of chance figure out what the final outcome is. It’s not completely controlled. It is that push and pull, I think, that he’s playing with, that he’s very much aware of that, that as well, and he’s incorporating that.
LK: Are you troubled or encouraged by the fact that there is a strange beauty to this?
MM:
Both, I think. Mainly troubled, but that gets to another topic that I’ve been thinking about with this work, and it’s this notion of the toxic sublime. An aesthetic that’s been described predominantly by visual culture scholars, talking about that tension that arises from recognizing the toxicity of a place or an object or a situation while simultaneously appreciating a sense of beauty or mystery or awe-inspiring nature of it, right?
JG:
Let me cut in here for a second. I am really intrigued by this concept of the “toxic sublime.”
LK:
It was first coined by Jennifer Peeples, around 2011, to describe the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky: strangely beautiful images that picture contaminated places, sites of human extraction, as things that incite a sense of mystery and some strange beauty.
JG:
What’s weird is this: Eighteenth-century philosophers introduced the sublime as an alternative to the beautiful. Beauty was about symmetry, harmony, clarity, and grace; it calmed our senses, made us joyful, educated us to become better people. The sublime, however, was all about terror, fear, and pain. Things that potentially overwhelmed the human observer . . . earthquakes, powerful thunderstorms, dangerous landscapes, volcanic eruptions . . .
LK:
and in this, as German philosopher Immanuel Kant eventually added, the sublime not simply reminded us of our smallness and relativity on this planet, but allowed us in recognizing this very smallness to find our own identity, our confidence, as humans.
JG:
Right. But how can you have a toxic sublime? Earth void of oxygen becomes toxic for us and so many other living beings on this planet, but if all this truly destroys what we take for granted, it also destroys the very place of the sublime in art.
LK:
Let’s hear how Meredith Malone and Santiago Sierra address this issue:
MM:
And I do think that that tension that’s at the core of that idea of the toxic sublime is something that Sierra’s playing with. That you can be drawn in by this thing by, it’s immense, I mean, it is very, a very big grid, right? You can draw by the size of it, by the scale of it. And to a certain extent by the beauty of it. And I think that’s why it, it works as an interesting piece of art, actually, you know, it’s not over didactic, but when you’re at standing in front of it, it brings up this whole range of questions and concerns from a macro to the micro, you know, cosmic about our bodies, about the air quality around us, about how it infiltrates our own bodies.
JG:
I guess the point here is that we don’t inhale the air Sierra’s images represent. We just look at it.
LK:
And that this looking, as a result, becomes quite troubled, unsure about its normal operations.
JG:
And, you might want to add, that Sierra’s art, in exploring the toxicity of our present, doesn’t want to offer clear answers, policy recommendations. It’s primary point is to ask, to make us ask questions.
MM:
You’re looking at these disgusting images. Beautiful, disgusting images. And just being around, listening to people in the galleries, the immediate questions are, what is the air that I’m breathing right now is that what? It’s doing to my body. I should also say it kind of smelled originally to there was another kind of sense element. After he made them, he actually had them tested first to see what kind of bacteria was in them. It’s a whole range of things that you might expect. inspect things that might cause pinkeye or conjunctivitis, that kind of stuff. And then he had them all sealed by a conservator. So I think what the smell was really whatever they use to seal them. When we’re installing the work, I had this aha moment where I was working with two of our preparators. We opened up the crates. And there was this smell one preparator who is a smoker was like, oh, whatever I’m inhaling with these cigarettes is much worse than whatever this work might be conveying , but he immediately made this connection, you know, to, our own lungs and a body and what we’re we are inhaling was kind of immediately apparent.
INTERFERENCE 1
TH:
Wow, can we pause here for a moment? Sierra’s work, it sounds, doesn’t just capture the nature of foul air today. It actively contributes to it.
JG:
You know, Tori, I totally agree. Sierra’s images are quite multi-sensual, aren’t they? What makes them most interesting to me, though, is what they have to say about the increasingly precarious nature of the air we need to live.
TH:
I’m not surprised, given your attachment to the beauty of 21! The right percentage of oxygen enabling life on this planet, right?
JG:
That’s right–good memory! It took millions of years for that level to develop and stabilize. . . and just as many years for organisms to transform oxygen into a viable source of life. We don’t really talk about it all that often, but too much oxygen can be as deadly for organisms as too little – and that includes us, our bodies.
TH:
And actually – mind if I jump into chemistry-nerd mode for a second here?
JG:
Not at all, you know that!
TH:
Okay. Well, another thing we don’t often talk about: Ozone—O3—is actually a special molecular form of Oxygen. We talked a bit about this already in the episode I co-hosted with Emma about Smog a few weeks ago. Unlike the stuff we need to breathe, which has two atoms clustered into one molecule, Ozone has three. It’s primarily formed when heat or sunlight triggers some chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides and other types of hydrocarbons.
JG:
Which sounds like bad news.
TH:
Well, yes, and no. Life on earth, at least as we know it during this current interglacial period, needs a good amount of ozone in the stratosphere to absorb too much radiation from the sun.
JG:
But if there’s a hole in that layer . . .
TH:
. . . harmful levels of ultraviolet light reach the surface of the Earth and create all kinds of problems. On the other hand, too much ozone in the so-called troposphere—the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere—traps infrared radiation from Earth’s surface and directly contributes to global warming.
JG:
. . . and adds to the spread of greenhouse gases whose effects on breathable air we see on Santiago Sierra’s fifty-two canvases.
TH:
Yes! The story of Ozone is complicated, a weird push and pull. But it’s also actually kind of hopeful. In 1987, the so-called Montreal Protocol mandated a radical international reduction in the use of chlorofluorocarbons, which were largely responsible for the depletion of stratospheric ozone up to that moment. Holes in the ozone layer aren’t entirely gone, in particular in Australia, Antarctica, and the southernmost portions of Latin America. But the Montreal agreement really did help to reverse a trend.
JG:
A rare moment of effective international climate cooperation and legislation.
TH:
Possibly the most consequential example of our lifetime – so far, at least. The story of tropospheric ozone is different though. Since 1995, the level of ozone in the lowest layer of the planet’s atmosphere has increased somewhere between 2 and 12% per decade, largely due to the continued burning of fossil fuels.
JG:
And we’re nowhere near reversing that trend.
TH:
Too much Ozone near the surface of the earth can cause the muscles in your airways to constrict. It essentially traps air in your lungs, which gives us shortness of breath. It makes us wheeze and cough. It makes our throats scratchy.
JG:
If it can turn white canvases brown or black over a period of weeks, imagine what it might be doing to our bodies over the course of a lifetime.
TH:
Scientists have a useful rhyme for this rule: Ozone is good up high, and bad nearby.
JG:
We have a long way to go to get that balance right again. But as the Montreal Protocol proves, with purposeful collective action, reversing these trends is far from impossible.
PART 1 (Continued)
LK:
Atmospheric ozone is only one of the many threats exemplified in Sierra’s work. As 52 Canvases makes clear, air pollution and its attendant muck, dust, and damaging greenhouse gases seriously degrades the quality of the air we breathe. But I think the work also raises some questions about the relationship between artistic inquiry and scientific research – and about the border between the two, which may not be quite as impermeable as we often think it is. And when I spoke with curator Meredith Malone, I also wanted to hear her thoughts on the difference between art and artful forms of scientific communication:
MM:
This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about too. Next week we’re going to be doing a panel discussion here, which we’re calling the Toxic Sublime, where we bring in, an art historian, a faculty member from environmental studies, and then a faculty member from engineering who studies air quality to talk about those kinds of questions, how they visualize, how do they communicate, the data that they’ve acquired. How do you communicate that to a general public? And what are the positive and negative repercussions of doing that?
LK:
As Meredith put it, all these things are interpretations. Data visualization is a kind of interpretation, as is art.
MM:
You might have an air of objectivity, but there’s plenty of subjectivity involved in that too. And I think, what kind of thing that Sierra’s doing, what makes it very interesting to me, is that it, yes, on the one hand, it is a visualization. Climate change is such a big abstraction in the end. And then he’s making it tactile, like literally making it tactile on these canvases. On the one hand, there is like an element of the illustration that is interesting. But I think for all those other reasons that we’ve talked about, where it’s also a play, making us think about the photographic in the cinematic and larger questions about abstraction, there are so many layers to unpack with this work it has this element of simplicity, but it really is very complex. And I think with any good work of art it’s pulling out a whole range of emotional responses and visual responses that help us understand our contemporary world. That’s like the core of the really good artistic practice.
LK:
Santiago Sierra and in earlier phases of his career has done a lot of very provocative and controversial work that often involved also human subjects and, that at least some spectators found problematic, ethically, politically. This work is, is it less provocative? Is it more provocative? It no longer involves human subjects directly. It seems to shift tables. How, how does this fit into the larger arc of his career?
MM:
Very good question. I don’t know if I have a perfect answer, but I do still think that this work is provocative. I think it is an interesting shift. I wouldn’t say it’s an overall kind of career shift that he has. It’s another line of thinking maybe that he’s engaging with where yes, it is not about that kind of human on human cruelty that he was, very much putting on display and still does works in that vein.
This one it’s ultimately about the body, this work makes us think both about what’s happening to our own bodies, but also brings up the question how did we get here? A lot of his earlier work is about capitalist exploitation of labor practices, but this is still thinking about the broader socio-political systems that have put and put in place that have spurred on this, environmental degradation that have let it happen, the line of thinking that it sparks is ultimately about these inequities to these human inequities, like who gets to breathe what kind of air? Even the title of the work, it’s very blunt in a way, talking about Mexico City’s air, right? But of course, air isn’t bound by national borders. So it’s like, this is really about all of everybody’s air. This is about the global crisis.
JG:
I am really intrigued by how Sierra puts our bodies smack at the center of his work. But it also makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable…
LK:
Which of course is his point. Discomfort as a laboratory of insight.
JG:
It makes me think of other artists we’ve interviewed for earlier episodes. Juliana Snapper, for instance. Singing under water. Straining her body . . .
LK:
. . . to test the limits of art under rather distressing environmental conditions. Sierra’s case is a bit different, though. 52 Canvases really also draws attention to the purity, the clean white walls of the museum in which they are hung. It challenges the fiction of the white cube. And in this, he makes us wonder about the museum’s, any museum’s carbon footprint.
JG:
Which was something you already discussed with Amanda Hellman and Mark Scala in our previous episode on Carbon Dioxide.
LK:
Right. I pushed Meredith a bit on this issue as well.
MM:
Yes, it does definitely put a spotlight on what it means to bring in the kind of the outside grime, and the museums themselves are these very controlled climates. Right? We have to control the quality of the air, the temperature, it’s a completely artificial environment that requires a lot of energy to keep it going and these are questions that a lot of museums have to face right now, too. Ethically what are we doing, in terms of not only the museum demands as a building, what kind of resources we’re using, but also what, how we construct walls or what are we wasting in terms of materials and how are we shipping artworks all over the world on airplanes.
LK:
Coming back to the work itself. the shift from its original hanging, where it was kind of a passage, basically, that the viewer had to somehow explore with their own movements, which transformed individual images into a film that you generate by your own walk along those, those stills whereas you had the pleasure of hanging it as a grid. And the grid, of course, signifies also something quite different. If we go back to Rosalind Krauss the grid seems to be contained, but it really also points at a certain sense of infinity. And, thereby also transcend the very boundaries of the museum in which it might be contained . So, so maybe hanging into that grit also pierces a wall of your white cube.
MM:
Absolutely. And I was thinking of very much about the scale of the work too, you know, changing it to this grid does kind of point to the immensity of the problem too, as well.
LK:
It becomes overwhelming, and you can’t control it through your own movement or put it at a distance.
MM:
If it’s at your every line was at your eye level. And now it’s like, you can get up close and see part of it, but then it just continued, you know, it’s like continues on above and above and above,
LK:
And the timeline also gets a little unclear, right, for the viewer now? Where initially it was each week of the year was set up in a orderly fashion. Now it’s no longer that clear and somehow our concept of time or our way of ordering time gets messed up basically and opens up to a different sense of time that might not be pivot just around human understandings of time.
MM:
Right. Aestheticized in a way that it wasn’t. Wasn’t before. Yeah. Yeah.
PART 2
JG:
It seems like Sierra’s work has the power to slow down our sense or experience of time. But in a short story I want to talk about, time seems to be speeding up as an effect of the characters’ brain power slowing down. It’s called “Exhalation.” Have you ever read it?
LK:
By Ted Chiang, right? I taught it in one of my recent undergraduate classes!
JG:
I bet your students loved it!
LK:
They were clearly puzzled by it at first. Intellectually out of breath. But eventually they found their bearing and explored some really great interpretative angles.
JG:
That’s fantastic! “Exhalation” is the titular story from Chiang’s 2019 collection, which was heralded by critics – it was actually one of the New York Times’ top ten books of the year! Chiang is probably best known, though, for writing the short story that was the basis of the film Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.
LK:
Ted Chiang is also a technical writer and a public scholar who works a lot on AI. He’s one of the more cerebral and timely sci-fi writers publishing today, and he manages to write high-concept science fiction that still feels almost like it could be real, like a version of a reality that awaits us in a not-so-distant future.
JG:
After all, real life can feel a lot like science fiction these days. “Exhalation” is set in an unspecified future time peopled by humans that are really more than human. Here’s Chiang in conversation with Everdeen Mason from The Washington Post in 2019:
TC:
Some people refer to the protagonist of the story as a robot, and to me, you know, the protagonist is not a robot because a robot to me implies that they were constructed by another race. They stand in contrast to an organic race, whereas the, the inhabitants of Exhalation, they have, in my mind, they have the same standing in their universe that we have in ours. So they are people. It just so happens that they are made of metal.
LK:
So they’re humans…made of metal?
JG:
They’re described as having cyborg-like features, such as pullers and levers under their skin. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.
LK:
“I’ll be back”?
JG:
Let’s not go there. What’s most salient for our discussion today is that these future cyborg people have air tanks for lungs and are, as Chiang puts it in that interview, “powered by compressed gas.” In order to stay alive, they must continuously replenish the gas in their air tanks.
LK:
But Chiang gives this air source a sci-fi twist—he doesn’t refer to the air in these tanks as oxygen, but as argon.
JG:
Argon is the third most abundant gas in Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike oxygen, it isn’t actually necessary for human breathing. In fact, inhaling pure argon can be dangerous and potentially even poisonous.
LK:
The word’s origins come from the Greek for “inactive” or “lazy” which refers to the fact that this gas is not reactive to chemicals. This is why argon is commonly used as a shielding gas in welding and other high-temperature industrial processes.
JG:
But its function in Chiang’s story adds some interesting layers. If argon is what fills the lungs of these future cyborgs, it suggests a time when oxygen is perhaps scarce, or when humans have evolved beyond needing oxygen to survive.
LK:
That would make sense considering how our carbon-intensive lifestyles are compromising oxygenated air as a breathing source. That is, after all, what Sierra’s work so vividly shows.
JG:
Exactly. And Chiang’s story takes this idea of a breathable air shortage a step further. His main character goes to great lengths (I’m talking auto-dissecting his own brain!) to discover that the world that they inhabit is in fact enclosed. As Chiang puts it, their universe is “a sealed chamber rather than an open well.” This enclosed environment creates an equalization of air pressure, which ends up being a catastrophic proposition in the story.
ML as TC:
[A]ir is not the source of life. Air can neither be created nor destroyed; the total amount of air in the universe remains constant, and if air were all that we needed to live, we would never die. But in truth the source of life is a difference in air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it is thin. The activity of our brains, the motion of our bodies, the action of every machine we have ever built, are driven by the movement of air, the force exerted as differing pressures seek to balance one another out. When the pressure everywhere in the universe is the same, all air will be motionless and useless; one day we will be surrounded by motionless air and unable to derive any benefit from it (50).
LK:
Not your average science-fiction fare, but unsettling nonetheless!
JG:
It is, isn’t it? Chiang is so good at justifying his science-fictional premises through what seems like sound science. Of course, we do not live in enclosed bubbles ourselves, so this idea of a finite atmosphere does not directly apply to our own planetary situation. But this idea that a difference in air pressure fuels all life, and that loss of the dynamism of that air pressure is a threat to all life, is really fascinating and — of course timely.
LK:
Every breath, every movement contributes toward an inevitable state of “fatal equilibrium” in the story, which will one day bring this civilization to a total standstill.
JG:
And until that moment comes, the cyborgs’ thoughts will gradually slow down, making the world around them seem to accelerate—clocks seem to tick faster, pendulums wave frantically, objects crash to the ground. Wasted air becomes a great offense in this society, as all life and conscious thought is bound up in the power of air and the finite gift of exhalation.
LK:
There’s a lot here to unpack, Jen.
JG:
The concept in “Exhalation” of air equalizing and human action and thought stopping, it reminds me of those little toys, the wind-up toys. Do you know what I’m talking about?
LK:
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
JG:
I used to play with them as a kid and sometimes they’d come in like a McDonald’s happy meal. And you could wind-up the toy and then it would skitter about on a table-top until it kind of slowed down and petered out and then finally stopped.
LK:
And then what?
JG:
That’s it.
INTERFERENCE 2
EV:
Jen…can I jump in for a sec?
JG:
Sure, Emma, what’s up?
EV:
I’m a big fan of Chiang’s work, too, and “Exhalation” does feel particularly attuned to the anxieties of our times. But as I listen to you and Lutz talk about compromised air and potential extinction, I can’t help but think of the actual extinctions that are occurring because of polluting industries now.
JG:
It’s an important point, and one that Chiang’s story doesn’t really touch on. I was surprised by the fact that there are no animals or other species in the story, which seems a missed opportunity, especially considering his interest in cyber-pets in his story “The Life Cycle of Software Objects.”
EV:
Right. And you know, considering how animals are experiencing compromised ecosystems can also really help us tell a bigger story about the interrelationship between human industry, breathable air, and plant and animal life. A recent episode of John Oliver’s show “Last Week Tonight” comes to mind–
JG:
— Oh, I love that show!
EV:
Right? Me too. He really has such a knack for making big, complex issues feel urgent and accessible, doesn’t he? His recent segment on corn included a surprising aside about the threat to breathable air for marine life.
JG:
Marine life, huh? That’s not exactly the first class of animals I think of when I think of compromised air.
EV:
So fair. But you know, fish breathe too! They depend on access to oxygen in water to survive. But in an age of intensive industrial agricultural production, access to oxygenated air in waterways can no longer be considered a given. While discussing the contaminated run-off that comes from industrial production of corn, John Oliver brings up the prolific “dead zones” that emerge in huge parts of the ocean, especially in the summer months.
JG:
Dead zones are areas in the ocean where oxygen is cut off due to the presence of algae blooms that are triggered by excess nitrates and phosphates from the fertilizer that’s used in the large-scale production of industrial crops.
EV:
Like corn.
JG:
Right – so as we depend on nitrogen fertilizers to pump out our industrial corn quotas, excess nitrates run-off into our watersheds and eventually oceans, leading to huge zones that are essentially inhospitable to life.
EV:
According to National Geographic, scientists have identified 415 dead zones worldwide, and this number has increased dramatically in the past 50 years alone. For context, there were only 10 documented cases of dead zone in 1960.
JG:
Wow, that’s a huge spike.
EV:
Yup. In the U.S., the largest dead zone is in the Gulf of Mexico, which is not surprising considering the concentrated industry along the Gulf coast.
JG:
And of course, dead zones affect more than just aquatic life.
EV:
Right, wading birds that depend on fish for sustenance are impacted, and certain seafood, like oysters, that filter this compromised water can become poisonous to humans who eat them.
JG:
The effects of nitrates in human bloodstreams can also have longer-lasting toxic effects. Have you ever heard of blue baby syndrome?
EV:
Uh, no…what’s that?
JG:
It’s when infants have excess nitrates in their blood streams that cuts off their oxygen levels and makes their skin appear blue. It can lead to heart defects and in certain extreme cases, can be fatal.
EV:
Wow, whether we’re talking dead zones or blue baby syndrome, nitrates cut off oxygen supplies in a way that is hostile to animal and human life.
JG:
Yes, but also thinking about the effects of oxygen levels in waterways drives the point home that humans and animals are linked by this need for oxygen.
EV:
And preserving that essential lifeway means nurturing these multispecies bonds.
JG:
That reminds me of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, do you know it?
EV:
I do! Big fan.
JG:
It’s such a prescient meditation on what marine life—and especially marine mammals—can teach us as we navigate the interlocking crises of the present, which takes compelling form in the world’s oceans. I especially love Gumbs’s lesson on breath, where she writes:
ML as APG:
“Breath is a practice of presence. One of the physical characteristics that unites us with marine mammals is that they process air in a way similar to us. Though they spend most or all of their time in water, they do not have gills. We, too, on land are often navigating contexts that seem impossible for us to breathe in, and yet we must. The adaptations that marine mammals have made in relationship to breathing are some of the most relevant for us to observe, not only in relationship to our survival in an atmosphere we have polluted on a planet where we are causing the ocean to rise, but also in relationship to our intentional living, our mindful relation to each other.”
EV:
The examples she gives in the book—from whales to baby seals to Blacktip reef sharks—are really worth spending some time with. They exemplify the huge scale of this issue.
JG:
Her invitation to consider the survival tactics of marine mammals helps us examine the factors that obstruct our breathing in a society that puts profit over breath. The benediction that Gumbs gives us is this: “May our breathing open up to the possibility of peace.”
EV:
Wow. “May our breathing open up to the possibility of peace.” I really love that.
PART 2 (CONTINUED)
LK:
It may not directly touch on how breathable air impacts more-than-human ecologies, but “Exhalation” really makes you think about how much we depend on air—and in our case, oxygenated air.
JG:
It’s true. A threat to oxygenated air is a threat to biodiversity.
LK:
Not to mention the diversity of human thought and action.
JG:
Yes, and Chiang is definitely thinking in such directions. A detail I love in the story is how, in this future imagined world, filling their air tanks doubles as a source of connection and community. Chiang writes:
ML as TC:
“The filling stations are the primary venue for social conversation, the places from which we draw emotional sustenance as well as physical. We all keep spare sets of full lungs in our homes, but when one is alone, the act of opening one’s chest and replacing one’s lungs can seem little better than a chore. In the company of others, however, it becomes a communal activity, a shared pleasure.”
LK:
Wow, that is a lovely image, in its own strange way…
JG:
Isn’t it? Here’s Chiang from an interview he did in 2019 where he talks about his relationship with nihilism and optimism in his fiction:
TC:
I want to focus on the fact that science can be a really tremendous and beautiful and inspiring undertaking. And the process of scientific discovery, the experience of learning new things about how the universe works. I think those, those can give life meaning, you know. And that is a way that, you know, science offers an alternative to despair.
LK:
His perspective around the power of scientific inquiry seems especially important in a time when scientific engineering is being mobilized perhaps too hastily, especially in the name of “quick fixes” for massive, entangled crises like climate change.
JG:
And Chiang echoes some of what other interlocutors on our podcast have talked about: science is a discipline not for one-dimensional solutionism but for exciting exploration and discovery. The final image of “Exhalation” gestures toward the possibility for connection through scientific inquiry not only in the present-time of the story, but also between different generations and even possible universes. As the story’s civilization awaits its final state of deadly equilibrium, our narrator imagines future civilizations discovering them—frozen in time—and using their stagnant air to give life to their own. In Chiang’s vision, “a universe’s life span is calculable,” but “the variety of life that is generated within it is not”, and the story gestures out toward future civilizations evolving in part thanks to the reservoirs of air that exist in the stalled, equalized world of the story.
LK:
That’s a comforting thought, at least. And this notion of air-sharing is powerful. It seems to chime with Sierra’s efforts to document the quality of the air we breathe in shared urban centers. 52 Canvases asks us to consider art and temporality in relation to air quality. “Exhalation” is also thinking about the life-span of art in a world in crisis.
JG:
And more than that, it’s asking readers like us to consider the potential for life to create and re-create itself – as long as it has the physical and biological means to do so.
CONCLUSION
LK:
You know, Jen, I was really captivated by your earlier discussion with Emma about marine dead zones. It recalled that German thriller I mentioned in the beginning, depicting a world in which certain climate interventions stop the proper working of phytoplankton in our oceans. As a result, these oceans neither serve as a carbon sink, nor produce the nutrients or the oxygen necessary for sustaining life.
JG:
A breathless, oxygen-less ocean: that’s a true horror vision.
LK:
But it also makes me think, once more, about this idea of the toxic sublime. Some of Edward Burtynsky’s most memorable photographs show large ships rusting away along the coast in India and Bangladesh. Some people mine them for usable parts, but overall they radiate this sense of end time.
JG:
Rust displays oxygen at work.
LK:
Right. It emerges as a reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water or air moisture. Burtynsky’s rust, you might want to say, shows that metal and matter is more alive than we often assume. It engages with, responds to the environment. Rust never sleeps.
JG:
But that doesn’t make what we see in these images less toxic.
LK:
No. Or define them as a site of romantic identification, one that marvels about the stunning beauty of ruins.
JG:
His shipyards, his rusting shipwrecks, are dead zones, in other words.
LK:
Yes, like Sierra’s images. The world they show might invite some viewers to revel in feelings of sublime wonder. In truth, however, this rusted world, this world of dead zones, does away with the very conditions that make art possible in the first place.
JG:
Which is why I so appreciate Chiang’s work. It may look dystopian, but it really opens up a space to rethink our relationship, our entanglement, with natural and human-made environments.
LK:
Right. And another point might be this. We look at many artists in this podcast whose work doesn’t simply re-present the elements. They instead consider water or air as active collaborators in their artistic practice.
JG:
Julianne Snapper sang in the water, not just about the water. Jessica Houston allowed a glacier to transport her time capsule.
LK:
Exactly. And Santiago Sierra doesn’t make paintings about bad air. He works with bad air, makes it a catalyst of his process. But once art shifts from re-presentation to collaboration with the element, I wonder whether that old romantic trope of the sublime, including the toxic sublime, is still persuasive.
JG:
Because this art does so much more than just toying with the idea of life amid dead zones. It doesn’t simply ask us to discover our own smallness amid representations of the destruction we cause.
LK:
Yes, this art materially engages with this destruction, it is so much more than just a representation. And in this perhaps also probes some ways to move beyond it, beyond the dead zones of the present. The sublime doesn’t really capture this as a category anymore.
JG:
Well, the sublime as a concept insists on some distance, right? And that’s a form of non-entanglement, of detachment that, no matter how pleasurable it might be, no one can really afford anymore.
LK:
Or for that matter: wants to afford, should afford.
JG:
Because it comes at far too high a cost.
