Lolita

What is a cloud? How are humans affecting the air, the weather, and the conditions of the skies? How can climate be designed? Who owns an artificial storm? Cloud seeding is a type of weather modification that aims to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation. Through the artificial creation of ice crystals, weather modification can occur. Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft and seeding them with silver iodide. The hypothesis was that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane, and this led to seeding several Atlantic hurricanes. However, it was later shown that this hypothesis was incorrect. It was determined that most hurricanes do not contain enough supercooled water for cloud seeding to be effective. Such experiments are problematic, as several changes of environmental legislation had to be made to enable these trials. From a postnatural perspective, weather conditions have turned into economic and political negotiations, unveiling the complexity of a new climatic environment in which the movements of storms, clouds, and air currents are modified according to specific interests. A geopolitical story of invisible particles that reshapes the way of understanding climatology. This and many more complex situations will be discussed during the “New Ecologies: De-centralizing the human through contemporary art” seminar, starting October 17th. All info on our website www.instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org

A similar homology applies to the term “terrorism.” During the period of Jewish struggle against the British military in Palestine, “terrorist” had a positive connotation. In the late 1940s, American newspapers ran an advertisement with the headline, “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine,” wherein the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote, “My Brave Friends. You may not believe what I write you, for there is a lot of fertilizer in the air at the moment. The Jews of America are for you.” #israel #palestine #hamás