The Life of Air
The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating
edited by Monika Bakke
Monika Bakke
‘It’s alive!’ we could certainly exclaim if confronted with a microscopic view of air. As aerobiologists observe, ‘[h]undreds of thousands of individual microbial cells can exist in a cubic metre of air, representing perhaps hundreds of unique taxa’ (Womack et al., 2010: 3645). But what deserves special attention here is not only that air is full of life but also, apart from being a mean of transport and communication, air is a habitat in its own right. The zoe of air comes in abundance and we – breathing organisms – are all in this together for better and for worse, dead or alive. We have finally come to realize that air is messy, being neither an empty space nor a void, but a space where species meet. And like any other life form, as Donna Haraway emphasizes, we find ourselves ‘in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down’ (2008: 42).
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Dwelling in Air
Ann M. Womack, Brendan J. M. Bohannan, and Jessica L. Green
Biodiversity and biogeography of the atmosphere
Anna A. Gorbushina, Renate
Kort, Anette Schulte, David Lazarus, Bernhard Schnetger,
Hans-Jürgen Brumsack, William J. Broughton, Jocelyne Favet
Life in Darwin's dust: intercontinental transport and survival of microbes in the nineteenth century
Anders Hedenström
Extreme Endurance Migration: What Is the Limit to Non-Stop Flight?
Elizabeth Thomas
Tomas Saraceno looks to the sky and sees possibilities
Steven Connor
Taking to the air
Nonhuman Volatile Communication
Frederick R. Adler
Plant signalling: the opportunities and dangers of chemical communication
►Geraldine A. Wright, Florian P. Schiestl
►Michael R. Whitehead, Rod Peakall
Integrating floral scent, pollination ecology and population genetics
►Corinna Thom, David C. Gilley, Judith Hooper, Harald E. Esch
Anthropology of Scents
►Gordon M. Shepherd
The Human Sense of Smell: Are We Better Than We Think?
►Charles J. Wysocki, George Preti
Facts, fallacies, fears, and frustrations with human pheromones
►Susana Camara Leret
Smellscapes: the loss of smell in a visual culture
►Usman Haque
►Oswaldo Maciá, Jenny Marketou, Chrysanne Stathacos, Clara Ursitti
Inspiration-Expiration
► Bogusław Buszewski, Martyna Kęsy, Tomasz Ligor, Anton Amann
Human exhaled air analytics: biomarkers of diseases
Breath I: pleasure
Breath Cultures
► Jarosław Kozakiewicz
► Tomas Saraceno
► Ruud Kaulingfreks , René Ten Bos
Learning to fly: inspiration and togetherness
► M. J. Parkes
Breath-holding and its breakpoint
Airborne Anxieties
► Simon Luechinger
► G. Liccardi, A. Custovic, M. Cazzola, M. Russo, M. D'Amato, G. D'Amato
Avoidance of allergens and air pollutants in respiratory allergy
► Lisa Fong Poh Ng
The Virus That Changed My World
► What You Should Know About Biological Warfare
► How to Survive- Biological or Chemical Attack
► Critical Art Ensamble
Bodies of Fear in a World of Threat