In this article, we’ll be looking to see if any landscape has an ambience. In doing so, we first highlight what in the landscape is opposed to ambience, namely detachment and distance, and then indicate that it is thanks to this detachment that the viewer’s participation in the landscape is possible as ambience. In this way, we attempt to show that any landscape, taken in an narrow aesthetic sense, implies a complementary double operation of withdrawal and fusion, contemplation and atmosphere, (...) but that it cannot be totally identified with an atmosphere, however holistic it may be. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine how weather phenomena affect the landscape, not only in terms of its visual or geomorphological appearance, but also by modifying the emotional disposition that the landscape evokes. By adopting an atmospheric perspective, I intend to demonstrate that each landscape possesses its own mood (Stimmung), closely linked to the atmospheric-climatic events that unfold within it. My hypothesis is that such phenomena, due to their pervasiveness on a sensory level, can produce a real metamorphosis (...) of the landscape, which also extends to the affective qualities that the landscape ‘radiates’, and which therefore do not primarily depend on the perceiver. My analysis is structured into two parts. In the first part, a) I attempt to prove that meteorological and climatic atmospheres, due to their extra-psychic nature, cannot be explained in empathic-projective terms; and b) I propose understanding the landscape as an expressive whole whose ‘emotional physiognomy’ changes according to the atmospheres that pass through it. In the second part, I support my argument with a literary example to show how the fundamental emotional tone (Grundstimmung) of the landscape can change radically following the manifestation of a specific atmospheric phenomenon. (shrink)

Atmospheres are affective, sensory realms, where mood is palpable. Memory landscapes intensify affectivity, amplifying emotion. The senses, especially smell and taste, trigger and heighten memory. There is therefore a potent intersection between landscape, atmospheres, memory, and the senses. These connections present the compelling prospect that atmospheres could be designed, with the intention of enhancing memory landscapes through sensory means. This paper is written from the perspective of landscape architecture, a discipline which designs and shapes landscapes. Landscape architects work within the (...) spatially and temporally fluid context of the landscape, and aligned with this is the prospect of generating and tuning atmospheres. Past traumatic events, losses of people and places, float in atmospheres of melancholy. Two projects are explored here to probe the possibilities of intentionally invoking atmospheres, exploring how the landscape could be sensorially tonalised. The memorial landscape of Pike River where 29 men died in a mine explosion, and Laura Daly’s augmented reality artwork, The Storm Cone, offer insights into the possibilities of atmospheric design. (shrink)

The origin of the relationship between landscape and atmosphere in the literary text must be sought first and foremost in the prototypical Stimmung that characterizes a given culture and from which, the specific interaction between man and the environment in a certain space, arises. In this sense, each literature will be a mirror of the specific contractive or expansive tendencies that characterize this interaction. Taking this into consideration, this article proposes a reading of the relationship between the Russian culture and (...) the urban landscape, mentioning the possible identification of a real ‘Russian urban text’, in which the novel My by Y. Zamyatin can also be included as an example. (shrink)

Following the observations of Antal Szerb on the Italian countryside, this article presents, in succession, the divers aspects of a landscape that a beholder experiences as a presence. A landscape affects the body of the beholder and the adopted bodily posture has some bearing on the physical and atmospheric manifestation of a landscape. Both the material characteristics and the expressive, animated qualities of the landscape are unpredictable and subject to continual modification. The atmosphere of a landscape consists of a specific (...) ‘emotional essence’ diffused throughout the material elements. In addition, the landscape may reveal its restrained, silent, perfect, and beautiful presence. The beauty and perfection of the landscape arise from the experience of synchrony with the surroundings and in the personal significance attributed to a scenery. (shrink)

This paper describes two contemporary houses and their respective gardens: the small post-earthquake temporary shelters in Onna, Italy and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Southern England. To dwell, as per the Heideggerian perspective, is an act of cultivation of the soil, the transformation of wilderness into a tilled (architectural) garden: it entails rootedness, permanence, and recurring practices of care. Nevertheless, what these two architectural gardens show is that in our time, while caring for the land can still epitomize the subjugation (...) of chthonic forces, attempting to institute an ecological relation of domination, it may also point in an altogether different direction. In Onna, the gardens appear as an act of resistance against the menacing forces of wilderness; Jarman’s attitude is that of a pathic acceptation of the atmospheric powers pervading the vast marine environment. (shrink)

A landscape is commonly conceived as an arrangement of items on solid or liquid surfaces. Despite its entanglement with the landscape, the weather condition tends to be overlooked. The liminal case of a thick fog that suppresses the view of the environment challenges this standard understanding. The paper examines the experience of being lost in fog with respect to perceptual, spatiotemporal and emotional aspects. Fog suspends the everyday scopic regime and the inconspicuous ‘immateriality’ of air as medium of perception, distorting (...) the patterns of perception and temporarily installing an own spatiotemporality. Moreover, fog is an atmospheric phenomenon par excellence, a quasi-thing and a quasi-agent that is usually felt as distressing and maleficent yet may trigger a sense of wonder as well. While it is considered a deficit in epistemic issues, nebulosity has a strong aesthetic expressivity, whose sources range from semantic ambiguity to defamiliarization and the transfiguration of the ordinary. (shrink)

This article explores the spatial dimensions of selfhood and the pathic felt-bodily resonance, emphasizing their role in understanding the connection between health and the environment. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, it provides an overview of the relationship between embodiment, spatiality, and affectivity and their alterations in mental conditions. It highlights the significance of alterations in affective permeability and embodiment, particularly in conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, and addiction, which lead to distortions in lived space and constrictions in the field of available (...) affordances. It suggests the concept of ‘therapeutic atmospheres’ as those that open the corporal and emotional space of the patient and flexibilize the field of affective intensities navigated by them. It highlights the relevance of the therapists’ atmospheric competence and body availability to sustain the therapeutic space. (shrink)

My hypothesis is that landscape is identified by the atmospheric feeling it radiates in a now constant and now more ephemeral way and by the felt-bodily resonance it generates in those who simply perceive it, and a fortiori in those who are also deeply affectively grasped by it. In partial contrast to a reductionist approach prevalent today, the intention is to demonstrate that the (feeling of) landscape, in its constitutive extraneousness to the objective-quantitative dimension, can never be fully explained in (...) pragmatist and socio-constructivist terms. In fact, it holds and even enhances its critical role if its fundamental affordance remains that of allowing a ‘contemplative’ (in the broadest sense) perspective, i.e. a involuntary, distanced, supervenient as well as ‘framed’ by boundaries perception. Precisely in questioning its boundaries, how it extends exactly as far as you feel its inherent atmosphere, the paper sketches in conclusion a liminology of the landscape on an atmospherological basis. (shrink)

The following article deals with atmospheric boundaries in landscapes. The first part focuses on their change, the situational shifting of atmospheric boundaries – their fading in and out, their temporality on the one hand, and their permanence on the other. The initial focus will be on landscapes in general, and on their boundaries that include atmospheres as boundary phenomena. Special attention (in a phenomenological sense) is given to the ‘psychoscape’ in which emotional border-experience is formed. The second part is dedicated (...) to a current topic of political atmospherology. It will explore the atmospheric borders of war, which, for their part, unfold in actual space, but at the same time, also dispose of the atmospheric border experience. Thus, the article presents an analysis and description of the varieties of borders and boundaries that war transforms or creates. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is used as an example. (shrink)

Landscape, body and atmosphere form a triad and must be conceived as peculiar dimensions of the ‘third’ and, at the same time, in their fundamental and original connection. They are ontological phenomena, groundless reasons, or anarchic elements and the silent prerequisites of world experience. The present article explores the concept of the ‘third’ and describes the constellation between the landscape, the body and the atmosphere in dialogue with authors like Gernot Böhme, Gilles Clément and Graham Harman. This explanation leads us (...) to think about the political consequences of reconsidering the third and to develop a specific ‘Politics of the Sensible’. It is the task of the ‘Politics of the Sensible’ to recover what has fallen under the ruins of history, under the pharaonic construction of our civilization: to signify and develop the body’s own innate and learned sensibility and our vital relation with Earth. (shrink)

This essay traces the evolution of my thinking from ecological anthropology to a synthesis of linealogy and meteorology. As my ideas developed, via concepts of landscape and taskscape, I began to think of human lives as lived along lines, entangled in a meshwork. Yet every life is also lived on the ground, in the zone of interpenetration between earth and sky. And the sky is the domain of the weather. My challenge was then to understand the relations between lines and (...) the weather, or between the meshwork and the earth-sky world. This is where the atmosphere came in. Through a critique of the aesthetics of atmosphere, I argue for an approach that, in reintroducing the element of air, would fuse cosmos and affect. But this means undoing the inversion, characteristic of modernity, which turns the earth-sky world into landscape and scenery on which life is enacted. Ultimately, I find the relation between lines and the weather in the alternation of breathing in and breathing out. (shrink)

This article links atmospheres with the social construction of landscapes. The examination of the social construction of landscapes is an important research perspective, especially in German-speaking geographical landscape research. However, the sensory encounter with landscapes as a moment in the construction of conceptions of landscape has so far been ignored. Nor has research on atmosphere yet systematically addressed the question of how the experience of atmospheres can be linked to the social construction of spaces. In a conceptual argumentation, this article (...) shows two ways in which atmospheres can be relevant to the individual construction of landscape. On the one hand, the conscious experience of atmospheres is emphasised as a moment in which atmospheres can flow into constructions of landscape. On the other hand, it shows how atmospheres as a background phenomenon can influence situated perception and thus individual constructions of landscapes. (shrink)

Following Jean-Marc Besse’s identification of landscape as a dynamic, changing, relational and ‘emergent’ entity, I argue in this article that the artistic creative process is a way of ‘doing with’ landscape that fully embraces this peculiarity of landscape. The art of dance, in particular, makes it clear that it is the artist who creates a kind of mutual attraction between the (trans)formative forces of the landscape, suggesting its renewal and thus giving impetus to its metamorphic and transformative nature. Drawing on (...) Tonino Griffero’s neo-phenomenological approach to the characterisation of landscape as an atmosphere, i.e. as an emotional tonality effused in a ‘felt-bodily’ space, I emphasise the role of the affective dimension in the perception of landscape as something ‘to do with’ rather than ‘to act upon’ in artistic practice. To this end, I take as a case study Anna Halprin’s ‘exploratory’ dance, which focuses on fostering an individual and collective search for a harmonisation of the relationship between movement and emotion. Drawing on notions of the ‘felt body’, ‘atmospheric affordances’ and ‘ecstasies of things’, I analyse the role that her outdoor dance studio – designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin – plays in placing the creative process at the centre of dance’s very specific way of ‘doing with’ the landscape. (shrink)

Landscapes are paradigm cases for a theory of atmospheres like that of Hermann Schmitz since there are several atmospheres which can be experienced in landscapes. Though, landscape is rather seldomly picked out explicitly as a central theme in Schmitz’s work. An exception, however, is his article Landscape as a Mode of Perception, in which he argues that something becomes a landscape not by belonging to so-called nature, but by a specific mode of perception. I will critically analyze his conception of (...) landscape and argue that landscape is more than a mode of perception: the aspect of naturalness must also be given. Corporeal communication with vastness and, that is, excorporation (Ausleibung), is not enough to understand what is specificity of the landscape. The inclusion of the dimension of naturalness allows us furthermore to better understand one of the most important functions of landscape, namely recovery, and the often-associated transcendence of the subject-object-dichotomy. (shrink)

This essay phenomenologically probes into the conceptual terrain encapsulating the notion of ‘landscape’. Drawing upon instances of artistic representations of landscapes, diverse facets of both actual and imaginary landscapes are delineated, encompassing cultural, chromatic, urban, and personal landscapes. It becomes evident that the apprehension of landscapes is intricately linked to the felt-bodily presence experienced within a specific locus. Thus, phenomenological and artistic methods based on the concept of atmosphere will become interesting for researching landscape. This is elucidated through empirical research (...) approaches such as strollology, Aisthetic Fieldwork, and artistic research. The article thus underscores the relevance of employing these methodologies in the scholarly investigation of landscapes, shedding light on their potential to unveil nuanced dimensions of human engagement with the environment. (shrink)

Christian Metz can rightfully be considered the founder of the semiology of cinema. This essay traces the supporting structures, and the problems connected to them, of this theoretical effort, starting first of all from the context that nourished it. The difficulties associated with both the construction of a general semiology and the use of its categories in cinema and artistic languages emerge.

Perhaps no meteorological phenomenon has enjoyed more interest than the wind. Both mutable and ambiguous, it has been interpreted in many ways over the centuries. This is particularly evident in the graphic arts, which have employed different strategies of representation. Taking the neo-phenomenological interpretation of the wind as a _‘_quasi-thing_’_, this paper explores the most common ways of representing this particular phenomenon within the European iconographic tradition, with the aim of identifying those that can best depict it in its quasi-thingly (...) nature. More specifically, this work aims to show that – under certain conditions – painting is not only able to express the particular meteorological and affective nature of the wind, but can also be a useful tool for shedding light on the so-called theory of atmospheres, which are themselves grounded in the thesis of the spatiality of feelings. With the help of a few examples from modern and contemporary painting, in which the wind finds its place as an aesthetic phenomenon, this paper outlines the possible characteristics of an atmospheric art in which the phenomenon is represented in all its affective power. Such art discloses or emphasizes the affective influence that phenomena such as the wind can exert on us, radically altering our sensory relationship with the world. (shrink)

The following article confronts two extremely different ideas of music, namely the more traditional ideal of music of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the innovative path taken on by the bohemian composer Gustav Mahler in its Symphonies. The harsh criticism of Mahler’s work done by Wittgenstein in its writings is widely known, he considered Mahler’s music as an inauthentic and sad product of the cultural crisis of their time. Nonetheless, it’s important to show how both tried to give answer (...) to the same questions with their own opposite methods and ideas. Through the analysis of Wittgenstein criticism first and Mahler’s musical language second, this article aims to reconstruct the ways they tried and the difficulties they met in their quest to inspire people at a time when every cultural value seems to be questioned, by showing the similarities and contrasts in their thoughts about the nature of the musical language and the role of the artist in its relationship with the audience. (shrink)

Two books by Eyal Weizman — written together one with Thomas Keenan and the other with Matthew Fuller – make it possible to take a retrospective look at what was initially presented as ‘forensic aesthetics’ and has now been brought back to the proceedings of an ‘investigative aesthetics’. Considered as a whole, forensic _and_ investigative aesthetics is one of the most interesting perspectives opened up in the field of aesthetics in this early part of the 21st century. It is a (...) synthesis that brings together a series of disparate demands that have emerged on the social, political and philosophical levels with the thought of difference and with the questioning of the centrality of Western culture, sometimes confronted with its claims to colonial domination, sometimes dragged into contradictions that verge on caricature. The challenge of forensic, investigative aesthetics consists in rediscovering precisely at the aesthetic level the opportunities for a common feeling (“aesthetic commons”) in order to create a shared space beyond the classic distinction between the private and public spheres. Investigative and forensic aesthetichs focuses on the constitution of material culture, in particular on the production of images and their processual, constructive nature. Therefore, a critical approach becomes also a political proposition relying on the legibility of creative processes and offering to multiple communities formed on a case-by-case basis not the already constituted truth of a final evidence, an image for example, but precisely the formation process of a common sense. The undertaking is ambitious. Reconstructing some of its steps can be useful to determine its aspirations and better understand its theoretical path. (shrink)

The contribution aims to investigate the influence of Max Scheler’s _Wesen und Formen der Sympathie_ on Ernesto De Martino’s thought, during the elaboration period of _Il mondo magico_’s theoretical framework. The paper claims that De Martino’s approach to Scheler’s phenomenology can be included among the conditions of possibility of the Italian philosopher’s detachment from idealism and of the formulation of his original epistemological stance. Within this framework, tracing _Sympathiebuch_’s line of influence on De Martino would make possible to read the (...) problem of the experience of magic from a phenomenological standpoint. In the first section, the paper provides an outline of the philosophical and cultural environment in which De Martino came into contact with phenomenology and, specifically, with Scheler’s philosophy. In the second section, the paper presents the features of Scheler’s philosophy that would influence De Martino’s thougt in the first half of the 1940s. To this purpose, the contribution takes into account _Sympathiebuch_’s main conceptual cores, taking as its guiding thread the definition of the phenomenological concept of _Mit-fühlen_ and the possibility to extend its potentialities to an ethnological project. In the third section, the paper presents an interpretation of _Il mondo magico_ in the light of Scheler’s categories, highlighting the argumentative junctures in which the phenomenological conceptual toolkit seems to be most effectively employed by De Martino in the study of magic and ritual phenomenona. (shrink)

In this work, I explored the complex relationship between psychological awe and the philosophical concept of the sublime. While psychology has often considered awe as a positive emotion distinct from the negative variant of the sublime, philosophical discourse has suggested an inherent historical and aesthetic connection between the two phenomena. I aimed to provide a preliminary contribution towards solving this puzzle, by relying on empirical findings from psychology and drawing from philosophical theories of Longinus, Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel. I suggested (...) a conceptualization of awe as a potential cultural evolution of the sublime, thus highlighting an overlap of key dimensions, such as vastness, self-transcendence, and alteration of sense of time. Moreover, I outlined practical insights and guidelines for eliciting awe in everyday life. Finally, the transformative nature of awe was explored by integrating psychological and philosophical perspectives, thus enabling a broader understanding of complex emotions and how they can influence human experience and wellbeing. (shrink)

Can painting evoke an experience of the sublime, understood in the terms adopted by Kant in the _Critique of the Power of Judgment_? I will present three considerations that imply that painting cannot evoke the Kantian sublime. I will then point out some problems related to each consideration. I will explain how some paintings can evoke an experience of the sublime, even when painting is understood in terms of the eighteenth-century European context. In this way, I intend to show the (...) real possibility of the Kantian sublime as a reaction to pictorial art. (shrink)

This article explores an actualisation of the Kantian sublime with reference to environmental aesthetics, examining its relevance and transformation in light of the current debate around the 'environmental humanities'. The main thesis of this article is that it is possible to actualise the Kantian sublime in the context of environmental aesthetics, emphasising the counterpurposiveness element of nature. This aspect makes it possible to show a dialectical relationship with nature, overcoming the mere opposition between nature and culture and promoting ethical responsibility. (...) In other words, the sublime can help us recognise the relevance of direct experience of nature and the need for a more respectful and sustainable relationship. (shrink)

The Kantian theory of the mathematical sublime can be studied from the point of view of the concept of the infinite, which admits a double perspective. On the one hand, we have the notion of sensible infinity (which must be understood as the capacity to always add a new unit to a previously given sensible magnitude). On the other hand, we find the infinite as something absolutely given. This latter conception of the infinite demands that we situate ourselves on the (...) suprasensible realm. I argue that in the Kantian theory of the sublime both notions of the infinite coexist, for it is a kind of aesthetic judgment that takes as its point of departure the estimation of objects which, because of their large size, suggest the idea of sensible infinity. And in turn, the latter rests on the infinite as something absolutely given, which can only be explained if we understand the absolutely infinite as a suprasensible magnitude. (shrink)

Within the first book of Manilius’ _Astronomica_ the exposition of doctrines concerning the Milky Way plays a central role. The poet presents the galaxy as such an eye-catching, luminous object that cannot fail to arouse the viewer’s emotions. Finally, wonder at the sublime spectacle of the galaxy is for Manilius the stimulus that prompts men to inquire about the causes of that celestial phenomenon. This article aims to analyze the relationship between emotion, sublime, and knowledge in the context of Roman (...) culture in the early imperial age. Manilius’ passage is then compared with Chapter 35 of Ps-Longinus’ _Treatise on the Sublime_, in which the theme of wonder at the grandeur of nature is central. Finally, as a demonstration of the vitality of the link between emotion and knowledge, a comparison is offered between Manilius and Chapter 5 of Seneca’s _De otio_. (shrink)

There is a structural proximity between the concept of the sublime and that of anguish; a proximity that, however, does not prevent the scene from being very different in terms of the affects involved. With regard to structure, at stake is a field that involves the pulsating, differential simultaneity of absence and presence, death and life. The principle of mutual exclusion is replaced by the logic of contradictory inclusion. I will limit myself, in this context, to recounting a brief stretch (...) of the history of the sublime, little travelled, in which the juxtaposition with anguish, a heterozygotic twin, brings to the fore the sameness of their structure - centred on the synchrony of opposites - and the inversion of the affects involved. The authors I will summon, in this brief stretch, are Jean-François Lyotard, as regards the sublime, and Jacques Lacan, as regards anguish. The theory of the sublime and that of anguish are frequently accompanied by the metaphorical evocation of membranes, tissue partitions. In what sense do the feeling of the sublime and the affection of anguish have to do with these tissue lacerations that, although belonging to the body, are, in truth, hors-corps? They are organs or parts of organs with such a slender structure as to be almost unreal, they are freed and go their own way, bearers of a pure life that slips and swirls, to the point of disquieting for a trait of immortality that they carry with them. (shrink)