Tomás SaracenoAerocene: Around the world to change the worldGrand Palais, 3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower

during The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP21December 4th – 11th, 2015 (free to the public)

Published at Hyperallergic asUtopian Mirror Ball Sculptures at Paris Climate Conference Are Full of Hot Air

http://hyperallergic.com/260000/utopian-mirror-ball-sculptures-at-paris-climate-conference-are-full-of-hot-air/

From below installation shots of Aerocene

PARIS — The balls of Aerocene hang high above Solutions COP21 , floating over ecocidal disaster-mongers as they sleepwalk visitors towards a total surveillance state. Inching through the mandatory metaldetector and navigating a sea of security cops watching over this green energy industry exhibition, TomásSaraceno’s eco-redemptive sculptural project, Aerocene: Around the World to Change the World, comesinto view.

One of his two huge shiny mirror balls hovers beneath the central nave of the Grand Palais. Unfortunately,this looming fish eye brought back my repressed memories of Jeff Koons and his current exhibition ofpoorly repainted famous paintings placed behind shiny blue mirrored balls. But once inside the GrandPalais, looking up at myself dazzlingly portrayed at the scale of an ant — the sculpture’s convex mirroredsurface bulges toward the light source, making everything appear smaller in the reflections — I saw thatAerocene lacks Koons’s cynical touch. Gazing up into the balls offers a reflected, 210-degree perspective,what in virtual reality is called the allocentric mirror world — the bird’s-eye view of a virtual world. And,indeed, Aerocene’s mirrored surfaces form a virtual image since the focal point and the center of curvatureare both imaginary points “inside” the mirror that cannot be reached. When viewed as a social project, thiswork’s unreachable utopian quality exudes the opposite sentiment of Koons’s low-hanging cynicism.

From below installation shots of Aerocene

We’re told often enough that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. Aerocene, a product ofSaraceno’s ongoing research and collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’sDepartment of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, is a direct response to the Anthropocene, thecatastrophic era few want to own up to having had a hand in creating and that, by the time it wasconsecrated by scientists, was already irreversible. We are past the tipping point. Yet who are the “we” hereto smear the entirety of humanity by casting it as the author of this late-modern “corporatocene”catastrophe?

Aerocene holds up a greenwashing mirror to both “us” and the Anthropocene, a distorted mirror that recallswhat Gene Youngblood said in Expanded Cinema: that the information explosion of the 1960s was “not awindow on the future so much as a mirror of the past catching up with the present.” But more than a bentmirror, Aerocene intends to avert the Anthropocene by mixing practical ecology and political ethics into acontemporary mode of movement accommodation. We will travel by balloon.

From the side installation shot of Aerocene

From the side installation shot of Aerocene

Aerocene, though here it is tethered down and looks like two giant Christmas ornaments spicing up the

industrial eco-fair going on below, is a sustainability project whereby air-fueled kinetic sculptures areintended to float around the world without engines, buoyed only by the heat of the sun and infraredradiation from the surface of Earth. The sculpture is intended to stay float without burning fossil fuels,using solar panels, batteries, or gases. In that utopian sense it is a throwback to the immersive mirrorcreated in 1969 by the Los Angeles wing of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) for the Pepsi-ColaPavilion at Expo 1970 in Osaka, Japan. That 210-degree mirrored sphere was simply a lightweight structurebuilt from 13,000 square feet of mirrored Mylar one one-thousandth of an inch thick, which spanned 90feet in diameter and 55 feet in height. Unlike Aerocene, it offered a walk in a concave mirror and had areflecting surface that bulged inward (away from the incident light).

After peering into the two hanging sculptures from the floor of the Grand Palais, I sought out a moreattainable bird’s-eye view — from the imperial, cordoned-off balcony terrace — so I could get a scaledview of the sculptures. It was here that the high-stepping ecocide impresarios in suits were hanging out,around the quiche and wine bar.

From my mezzanine-level vantage point on the Aerocene reflective globes, and from within the munchingpolitical eco-resource class, some troubling issues arose about the transcendent fish eyes approach to artand ideals of social change. They (the political power eco-class responsible for already having heavilydamaged our natural world through global warming), in their suspended Bohemian Grove, know about us,but we know nothing about them because they are a privileged ruling power, a separate elite class. Wedon’t know where they are, we don’t know what they do, but they have the ability to know about us andobserve us from above. So with Aerocene, Saraceno invited me (perhaps unintentionally) to think of thecirculation of energy and resources by means of a “thermodynamic imaginary.” For me that imaginaryoffers a counter-narrative to capitalist-corporate culture, and a more nuanced way of naming the componentthat has become the agent of systemic, destructive change.

Saraceno can summon all the smart green information he likes; he can shift scales, talk of saving humanity,or even of perceiving time and space from above the tipping point, but the problem with Aerocene ofdisplaying the human figure as a tiny, recuperated detail from above remains. The looming-overheadtechnocrats and their superior, “higher” global overview constitute the value system that created ourenvironmental doomsday predicament. I have had enough of the privatization of power and profit and thesocialization of guilt and debt. If Saraceno’s balloons do not signal a delegitimization of top-downmanagerial governance, what does their materiality matter? Perhaps Aerocene’s aesthetic ideology ofairborne perspective itself needs to pass over the Snowdenesque tipping point and take into account theiconography of mass surveillance. That would be a positive achievement for art and thought, as long as weare still here.

Joseph Nechvatal