Meeting #6: Cosmos Cooling

Planet Marx

Time: August 3, 2019

Location: 706 Youth Space, Beijing

Speaker: Jia Weng

Planet Marx held its sixth reading club meeting at the 706 Youth Space in Wudaokou, Beijing. We invited architect Jia Weng to introduce her ongoing research on climate control. Although air is invisible, the fact that we are able to control and design it reminds us that the sphere we live in is a collection of multiple physical substances, whose components are pulled together by chemical bonding. We tried to outline some complex relationships in this invisible material. For example, while the human species is often described as “animal laborans”, our labor and production are often largely affected by the climate that can be either natural or artificial. To modify the environment, in turn, is to reshape a society’s perception of the normal and the pathological.

During the meeting, Jia Weng first focused on the article “Air/Condition” by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. She also presented her recent research on weather control techniques of different scales, including how early air-conditioning and cloud-seeding technologies spread across borders, the relationship between technology and architectural space, as well as the intersection among weather, commerce and politics.

Click here for a summary of this session