Floating feelings: Emotion in the affective-meteorological atmosphere

This article engages with a series of artistic and collective experiments in floating to explore how emotion is affected by, caught up in, and otherwise choreographed by the meteorological atmosphere. Floating is understood in a dual sense: as the achievement of buoyancy in the medium of air, and as the social-affective cohesion and endurance of a collective. The primary contribution of this article is to develop an attention to the meteorology of affect and emotion by highlighting impressions, traces and sensual registers implicated in breathable airspaces, aeolian movements and thermodynamic relations between air and Sun. I do so by employing Sara Ahmed's social model of emotions and telling stories of the free-floating practices of the Aerocene Community. This article demonstrates how an attention to floating as both aerostatic movement and social-affective state can foreground relations between the airy and affective, reworking and reimagining the meteorological in studies of atmosphere.