Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
1. Envelopment  17
2. Sensing  35
3. Allure  55
4. Release  79
5. Volume  101
6. Sounding  121
7. Tensions  145
8. Hail  171
9. Elements  195
Notes  219
Bibliography  259
Index  279

About the Author

Derek P. McCormack is Professor of Cultural Geography at Oxford University, author of Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, also published by Duke University Press, and coauthor of Key Concepts in Urban Geography.

Reviews

"Derek P. McCormack offers a unique perspective on the relationship between object and atmosphere ... This title brings a fresh lens to topics as diverse as sensory perceptions, the concept of allure, and understandings of volume. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and researchers." - C. Leachman (Choice) "Atmospheric Things offers a bold new intervention in the study of media infrastructures with incredible lucidity. . . . This book will be instrumental to media scholars interested in new ways of thinking about the intersecting lines of infrastructure, affect, meteorology, envelopment, and even trauma and objecthood, where both human and nonhuman agencies from bodies to balloons are theorized in terms of the atmospheric. By inviting scholars to consider that the allure of atmospheres rests in its resistance to full perception and sense, and that the free-floating dirigibility of balloons offers productive ways to imagine and experience atmospheres, McCormack lays the groundwork for future work in atmospheric infrastructures and opens room for the enchanting, generative possibilities of simply letting go." - Miguel Penabella (Synoptique) "A thoughtful, challenging and very perceptively written work. . . . This book is very much about finding new and experimental ways, using the atmospheric thing of the balloon, to make explicit the atmosphere as a political, ethical and aesthetic commons." - Marijn Nieuwenhuis (Social & Cultural Geography)