In Climatic Media, Yuriko Furuhata traces climate engineering from the early twentieth century to the present, emphasizing the legacies of Japan’s empire building and its Cold War alliance with the United States. Furuhata boldly expands the scope of media studies to consider technologies that chemically “condition” Earth’s atmosphere and socially “condition” the conduct of people, focusing on the attempts to monitor and modify indoor and outdoor atmospheres by Japanese scientists, technicians, architects, and artists in conjunction with their American counterparts. She charts the geopolitical contexts of what she calls climatic media by examining a range of technologies such as cloud seeding and artificial snowflakes, digital computing used for weather forecasting and weather control, cybernetics for urban planning and policing, Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture, and the architectural experiments of Tange Lab and the Metabolists, who sought to design climate-controlled capsule housing and domed cities. Furuhata’s transpacific analysis offers a novel take on the elemental conditions of media and climate change.
ISBN-13: 9781478017806
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Publication Date: 03-25-2022
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Series: Elements
Yuriko Furuhata is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University and author of Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Outdoor Weather: Artificial Fog and Weather Control 25
2. Indoor Weather: Air-Conditioning and Future Forecasting 48
3. To the Greenhouse: Weatherproof Architecture as Climatic Media 80
4. Spaceship Earth: Plastics and the Ecological Dilemma of Metabolist Architecture 104
5. Cloud Control: Tear Gas, Cybernetics, and Networked Surveillance 133
Conclusion: Explicating the Backgrounds 166
Notes 177
Bibliography 215
Index 237
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