In the years since its publication, John Durham Peters's 2015 book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media has served as a conceptual wellspring for media theorists interested in explicating the relationship between concepts of media and the material world. Whereas Peters's tome was largely abstract in its theorizing of elements like water and fire as “media” in and of themselves, critics such as Melody Jue and Nicole Starosielski have put Peters's insights to more directed and historicized use, demonstrating the critical potential of an elemental or environmental approach to the study of media. As the editors of a recent special issue of the journal Representations dedicated to “Media Climates” see it, scholars like Jue and Starosielski have turned their interest in environmental media “into a burgeoning subfield, refining text-based methods while also expanding the field's methodological remit to include materials and infrastructure, as well as the insights of environmental theory, philosophy, and ethics.”Footnote 1 Yuriko Furuhata's Climatic Media: Experiments in Atmospheric Control emerges from and contributes to this burgeoning subfield, helping to establish (or reestablish, as Peters would likely argue) the fundamental connection between media studies and the natural world.
Furuhata's primary concern is to trace a transpacific genealogy of what she calls “climatic media,” a term that refers to everything from works of art to architecture, all the way to tear gas and closed-circuit surveillance systems. All of the media “objects” that Furuhata takes up look to exert control over atmosphere and weather, sometimes weaponizing the air around us (as in the case of tear gas) and sometimes creating artificial bubbles with their own atmosphere in an effort to sustain (certain) human lives in harsh environments. Through its focus on this desire to predict and control the weather, and on media developed to serve these ends, Climatic Media offers unique insights into the US-Japan relationship during the Cold War, tracing transpacific partnerships and their entanglements in wartime imperialism and postwar expansionism. The book covers a lot of ground by paying close attention to the air.
Chapter 1 begins with Nakaya Fujiko's fog sculpture designed for Osaka's Expo 70 (an event that serves as a through line for most of the book). Furuhata contends that Nakaya's sculpture “links the history of art to the history of science and technology” (p. 26). Such linkages are central to Climatic Media, and here Furuhata links Nakaya's art to the scientific work of the artist's father, Nakaya Ukichirō, who invented artificial snow, and further to the development of artificial cooling systems used to control the temperature of computer data centers. Reminding readers that the Vietnam War saw the first military deployment of digital computers, Furuhata stresses that “computers and weather control, already developed in tandem with one another, worked together as instruments of warfare” during the Cold War (p. 35).
From here, Furuhata traces the genealogical history of weather forecasting, tying it to theories of futurology that developed transpacifically in the 1950s. Chapter 2 once again brings our attention to the fact that predictions of the future, insofar as they relied on burgeoning computer technologies, required the controlled atmosphere of air-conditioning to keep data centers cool. Furuhata goes on to develop a theory of “atmospheric territorialization” at the heart of weather prediction (for which computing was essential), which she connects to the extractive logic of US and Japanese settler colonialism and imperialism.
This idea is picked up in more detail in chapter 3, which examines architecture as climatic media that, following the logic of the greenhouse, “are implicated in the production and maintenance of biological, racial, gendered, economic, national, and geopolitical hierarchies and orders” (p. 83). A central focus in this chapter is the well-known Tange Lab, along with affiliated members of the Metabolist school, and their experiments with domed architecture intended for polar regions. Furuhata claims that these postwar projects are genealogically tied to the colonial administration and city planning that Japan undertook in places like Manchuria and Taiwan during the interwar period.
The Tange Lab and the Metabolist architects are the focus of chapter 4 as well, wherein Furuhata highlights the tension between the group's utopian (and at times, environmentalist) impulses on display in their capsule architecture and their use of plastic. Figuring their use of plastic into the Marxist notion of the “metabolic rift,” and carefully historicizing the very notion of “metabolism” at the heart of their practice, Furuhata compares the “ecological dilemma” embodied in Metabolist architecture to more recent calls to geoengineer our way out of climate crisis.
Chapter 5 turns to methods of urban population control through two forms of climatic media: tear gas and networked surveillance. Central to this chapter is the transpacific history of cybernetics, which Furuhata traces largely through the figure of Norbert Wiener and his Japanese interlocutors. Here, too, Expo 70 makes an appearance, as Arata Isozaki's original design for its Festival Plaza (with its “cybernetic responsive environment”) was ultimately co-opted for surveillance and policing purposes. Climatic Media ends with a short but strong conclusion that expounds on the book's theoretical approaches and calls for media theorists to historicize their use of environmental metaphors, analogies, and methods—a practice for which Climatic Media could serve as an effective blueprint.
Those interested in Japanese media studies, theories of elemental/environmental media, and/or transpacific Cold War history will find much to celebrate in Climatic Media. It is likewise a welcome addition to scholarship on Metabolist architecture—one that reframes the group's idealism within the fraught contexts of war and environmental degradation. It is an important book that points the way toward a more critically minded mode of environmental scholarship that demonstrates the potentials of adopting a transpacific approach to the tracing of (often surprising) media genealogies.
