Breathing, the act of respiration, is one that puts the human body in direct, vital, and primordial relation with its environment. At the same time, neither this context nor the interplay between the metabolic and the environmental are well accounted for in aesthetic descriptions of outer experience or the phenomenal aspects of that experience. In Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes, Desiree Förster observes that despite being usually outside everyday perception, changes in the atmosphere fundamentally shift bodily, metabolic dispositions. She suggests that these changes can affect an aesthetic shift in which the pervasive but never quite present effects of gases and temperatures—within which all respiring organisms are embedded— might become, if not directly accessible, then accountable in an aesthetics that considers the climactic.
Needless to say, in the context of the Anthropocene, the atmosphere demands attention. Förster’s argument builds on new materialist theory that seeks to position the material...