Sensing the sky’s edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean Demilitarised Zone

The Korean Demilitarised Zone's (DMZ) status as the world's most hermetically sealed border inevitably creates a set of methodological difficulties to those researching it. How does one go about investigating a space that, through its restrictions and inaccessibility, eschews and refuses traditional methods of enquiry? In this paper, I demonstrate that novel and creative ‘atmospheric methods’ not only provide us with a means of overcoming difficulties around access to border spaces, but more importantly afford us new insights into how atmospherically attuned things and the materialities of weather become entangled with and produce border atmospheres. Utilising my own experiments in the production of radio-generated weather data at the Korean DMZ together with (auto)ethnographic perceptions, I posit that the meteorological atmosphere becomes a medium through which we can sense and understand borders, both conceptually and empirically. Exploring the interplay between the atmosphere and the inter-Korean border, I consider how borders become extended vertically into the skies above them, alongside the implications of traversing these airy territories. I then reflect on the ways that the atmospheres of the shifting political climate of the region are in turn projected into and onto the layers of the atmosphere, in ways that continue to shape how the border is secured.