Spatial Operations: Peter Sloterdijk and Contemporary Military Atmospheres
This creative practice Ph.D examines the nature of contemporary military atmospheres through the work of Peter Sloterdijk. On the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, this research starts from Sloterdijk's claim that the modern 'air-condition' is inherently linked to the atmospheric warfare of 1915. It critically analyses this and Sloterdijk's broader spatial theories of human 'atmospheres' in the context of contemporary militarism through both theoretical and practical methods. The resulting proposition of this research is that the defining characteristic of military atmospheres is not only their 'aerial' capacities, as Sloterdijk suggests, but rather their surreal spatial practices – a basis for which is found elsewhere in Sloterdijk and the writings of Roger Caillois, Rosalind Krauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Serres and Jakob Von Uexküll, along with several artists, including Char Davies, Trevor Paglen and Marcel Duchamp. This is presented through close interdisciplinary analysis of two examples of contemporary 'atmospheric' military practices: unmanned drones and military mythology. It demonstrates through two major creative works that both military mythology and atmospheric weapons share a surreal operational logic that expand current categorisations of these fields.As a practice-based thesis submitted within the Ph.D program in the School of Arts and Media, UNSW Australia, the demonstration of original contribution to knowledge lies in the production of creative works. This written document supports, contextualises and extends this contribution by giving the artworks a theoretical and contextual framework. The weighting of the practice to the written document can be considered at a ratio of 60% creative work to 40% thesis, although the success of this research ultimately rests on the reciprocity between theory and practice.