A sampling of this week’s news about air: Over the past seven days, 1.3 trillion digital messages passed through the air, including from new Mac Air Notebooks. Scented consumer products (even some labeled as “green”) are shown to emit toxic chemicals not listed on labels. In Calcutta, scientists discover that the membrane linings of eggshells absorb seven times their own weight in greenhouse gases. The term “pyrocumulonimbus” is coined to describe the towering, anvil-shaped, explosive clouds created by the smoke and heat of fires. 
In Bangladesh, Dr. Jahir Bin Alam finds a way to use microbes and cheap wood charcoal to remove ammonia emissions from industrial production of fertilizer. In New York, a public health study says children’s IQs are lowered by exposure to polluting hydrocarbons in the womb (experiment conducted on pregnant, non-smoking black and Dominican American women wearing air monitors whose children were subsequently tested at age five).
Today, global creatures (except those on life support) breathed involuntarily, unthinkingly. But to keep air breathable, we will have to think intentionally about it as material. It’s not so easy to do. Some poets have tried to bring the air and us into a unified, felt reality. In “Fresh Air,” Kenneth Koch wrote:
“Is there no voice to cry out from the wind and say what it is like to be the wind,
To be roughed up by the trees and to bring music from the scattered houses
And the stones, and to be in such intimate relationship with the sea
That you cannot understand it? Is there no one who feels like a pair of pants?”
But other poets prefer to trade on the classic ineffability of the air. In “Reverie in Open Air,” Rita Dove sighs peacefully, “Ah, the air now / Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing / But news of a breeze.”
There is no difference between air and the things that happen and are suspended in it. About air, not only are we not of one mind, but hardly mindful at all.
The breathers may not be thinking about air, but “we regulate every conceivable dimension of air,” says John Knechtel. “The content and frequency of radiowaves, the mass and height of building envelopes, and the movement of crafts through airspace, not to mention the ecology of airborne emissions. We have colonized the air with spatial and social delimitations. But don’t be fooled: air itself is always on the move. Air regenerates and reacts to us, and, perhaps even more cunningly, makes us react to ourselves.” Air has been transformed from the marvelous to the regular. How can we get reacquainted with our air? How do we go about perceiving air without reverting to the nostalgia of a “sylvan past” – and in keeping with our technological behaviors?
In Air, Knechtel has packaged an eclectic mix of 21 multi-disciplinary essays, photography, and graphics to shake up our thinking (such as it is) about air. Some of the writing is historical, such as Shannon Mattern’s illustrated essay on pneumatic tubes as a means of communication. Installed for the opening of the New York Public Library in 1911, the tubes will soon be removed. She writes:
“Phasing out handwritten requests on index-sized slips will allow for quicker and more accurate transmission of information. But it also means silencing the hiss, stopping the breath flowing through tubes at the library’s core. Given that the word pneumatic is derived from the Greek pneuma, meaning air, breath, or spirit, we might say that the eventual retirement of the library’s pneumatic tubes signals the passing of the spirit of their age.”
Rebecca Williamson, who teaches architecture at the University of Cincinnati, notes in her essay that air became “fresh” when mid-17th century physicians became concerned with persistent stinks – such as John Evelyn’s 1661 Fumifugium which found in industrial production “an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by fuliginous and filthy vapour.”
David K. Ross’ “HVACuus” is a series of 11 photographs documenting “the expelled vapor that is released by museum and gallery HVAC systems.” We notice that this air includes “the particulate residue of art works … paradoxically evacuated by the very buildings that are built to protect those works.” Actually, our noticing is our imagining through knowledge: we see billows of mist and we know they include particles sucked out of the galleries. Ross’ piece is about the will to perceive paradox.
Some of the commentary in Air covers various scientific, public works, and architectural studies and projects – in immediate and well-edited prose. Architectural critic Javier Arbona writes on some of these – including “In the Air,” a 2008 Madrid-based project aiming “to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid’s air” — and historian David Gissen’s plan to “reconstruct the historical air above Pittsburgh … meant as a provocation and a critique of selective bourgeois tastes of the historical preservation discipline” – and the “Nuage Vert” project which used lasers to outline the ordinarily imperceptible shapes of smoke and vapor plumes in the night sky of Helsinki.
Air also includes essays with a feature-writing or more personal verve, such as Kevin Finlayson’s piece on a mysterious airborne illness that struck his family, and Megan Griffith-Greene’s essay on “the world according to my tender, terrified lungs.” The collection has an ingenious rhythm: one moves from Cynthia Lin’s drawings of dust to “Piero’s Daydream,” Robert Kirkbride’s meditation on Piero della Francesca who “envisions himself an accountant of dust.”
There is much more, plus prose fiction, graphic fiction and poetry. Through the stimulating and varying use of typography, page lay-outs, color and b&w photos, and a brisk pace, Knechtel has created the illusion of a readably inhalable environment packed with dense, renewed air. His 21 contributors are professors, novelists, architects, journalists, and artists from Canada and the US. According to the World Health Organization, at least one of them (5%) will die from illness attributed to air pollution.
[Published by MIT Press on October 29, 2010. 320 pages, 200 color illustrations, $15.95 hardcover. John Knechtel is Director of Alphabet City Media in Toronto. Other titles in the Alphabet City series include Trash, Food, Fuel, and Water.]