Atmospheric attunement is a collective sensing out of what might be happening. A state of alert saturated with the potentiality of things in the making in a personal, political and aesthetic ambit that has not yet found its form but is always promising, and threatening, to take shape.

A perturbation or disturbance in the atmosphere animates a composition (Deleuze). Something throws itself together. An event. A scene. A daydream. A sensibility that incites or irritates like an itch. Anything can harden into a symbiosis of incommensurate elements or break up, drift off, shift tone, or fail. A style, a rhythm, a practice, a habit, a condition, a movement, or a mode of being can become a little world that feels like something you’re in - a scene of an inhabitability, the site of a subjectivity in the midst of its throwness or ordered viscerality, its forms of agency or retreat or collapse. The lived spaces and temporalities of home, work, shock, adventure, illness, rumination, pleasure, time out, down time, setting out or return instantiate the rhythm of a present steeped in the opening, compositional event.

Circulating forces are visceralized. They do not just register the effects of distant systems but instantiate an encounter. Intensities lodge in bodies and in modes of attention and attachment. Forces happen in emerging forms; forms come already fully charged with force. A sensorium attuned to atmospherics grapples not only with things or power, but with the world – a worlding.

New forms of attending and inhabiting take place as a cross-modal synaesthesia, a sharing of form or force across a topology of heterogeneous objects and registers. The atmospherics of ordinary life pop with the alternating current between what gets actualized in a moment and what gets sensed, sharply or vaguely, with pleasure or pain, as a potential, a regret, something missing or something finally realized.

Every place or space or habit that’s lived is a condensed string of things snapping in and out of the senses. There is all the watching, the feeling out, the trying on – one thing after another. All the collective fictions of some kind of “life” popping up or just popping. There is the racing to keep up with things, the down time spent churning things up. All the sidling up to things, the surprise immersions, the states of arrest, the gangly wanderings, the accrual. There is the habit of being in the situation you’re in “as if.” As if it’s a trajectory. As if it’s over. As if it’s all, or nothing, or enough, or never enough, or not for you. But still something you’re in, trying to attend to what matters or what might matter if.

Everywhere now I overhear the question “how’d you get into that?” Why that? What is it? I never heard of it. Where is it? How? Wow. Ha. Ya.