Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control

Yuriko Furuhata’s Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control participates in discussions about geoengineering and elemental media, drawing on existing critical work as well as demonstrating how those themes open up through design and architecture scholarship with the help of media studies. It is this vibrant cross-section of spatial studies and their media theoretical contexts that also shows the strengths of Furuhata’s approach in how the book reframes geopolitics—especially indeed of the transpacific region—in terms of multi-scalar atmospheric manipulation. The focus on architectural techniques is a case in point, especially as it also then becomes a story of “modern imperial projects of biopolitically managing habitats and the human populations within them,” which for Furuhata becomes an underpinning theme that defines contemporary forms of geoengineering as thermostatic desires, which is a key term in her book. Such desires seem implicitly to concern the planet as a holistic entity, itself one particular...