Kit Webb

To write on air—that which surrounds us, from which we draw breath, now thick with our emissions, our signals, our machines—might seem to call for a writing that can convey our immixture, and be at once convoluted and diffuse. That, at least, is the suggestion of its more recent surveyors, whether in Steven Connor's cultural history of air, or Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of our airborne condition.

But to write on a diminished air—air that's no longer breathable, whether because it's too thin or too vacuous, too clogged or cloying—may then suggest other modes. Beginning with Robert Boyle's first experiments manufacturing a vacuum in the seventeenth century—drawing from his apologies, scruples, suspicions and digressions—this project engages with and trials the different forms of writing air's lessness has and might solicit.