mccormack aerostatic spacing

Trans Inst Br Geogr

NS 34 25–41 2009ISSN 0020-2754 © 2009 The Author.

Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Aerostatic spacing: on things becoming lighter than air

Derek P McCormack

The development of practical aerostatic or lighter than air balloon flight in 1783 marked the emergence of a new way of being and becoming mobile, one that also involved an important technical and experiential transformation in earth–atmosphere relations. This paper narrates an account of the distinctive kinds of spaces of which aerostatic flight is generative. At the centre of this account is the claim that the affective materiality of aerostatic flight is simultaneously processual

and

possessing of what political theorist Jane Bennett calls ‘thing-power’. In developing this claim, the paper draws from a range of historical and contemporary accounts of aerostatic flight in order to elaborate upon three aspects of the spaces of things becoming aerostatic: the distinctive kinds of sensing of which aerostatic flight is generative; the differential qualities of affectivity in which the movement and materiality of aerostatic things participates; and the kinds of vertiginous events in which the felt movement – actual or anticipated – of aerostatic things is implicated. The paper concludes by speculating upon how attending to the distinctive and sometimes disquieting materiality of aerostatic things might contribute to geographical engagements with the spaces of air and atmosphere.

key words

air affectivity atmosphere balloon materiality mobility

School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QYemail: [email protected]

revised manuscript received 18 July 2008

Preamble

It begins rather suddenly, torque-like: a sense ofanchorage giving way to tensile instability. It happensas a minor corporeal reorientation, an incrementalrebalancing of body-space, an unthinking adjustment offeet: the sensing of a kind of torsional ungrounding.This sense is quickly replaced however by somethingelse: steady uplift, generated by 5500 metres cubed ofenveloped helium, the force of which is balanced by thesteel cable unwinding, slowly, from a point hiddensomewhere below the ground. And so commences theexperience of ascent, one which, save for wind,metalcreak and audible cablestrain, is largely silent.

Located in Parc André Citroën in Paris’s 15thArrondissement, the Eutelsat balloon has been inoperation since 2002. So long as the weather isreasonably calm, and the wind moderate, on mostdays between 9.00 am until the park closes, the

balloon ascends to a height of 150 metres or so atintervals of about 30 minutes.

1

In May 2007 I spenta day in the park, making three ascents in theEutelsat balloon. Between ascents I observed theballoon and other park users acknowledging,responding, ignoring or orienting themselves tothe variable presence of this aerostatic thing risingand falling at reasonably regular intervals in theirmidst. The visit to the park was made as part ofa research project about the 1897 Andrée balloonexpedition to the North Pole (see McCormack2008). While the expedition was Swedish, Paris,and Parisian balloons, were central to the material,imaginative and affective geographies of the enter-prise. The expedition balloon ‘The Eagle’ (Örnen)had been constructed in the factory of HenriLachambre on the Rue de Vaugirard; one of theexpedition members – Nils Strindberg – had made

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NS 34 25–41 2009ISSN 0020-2754 © 2009 The Author.Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009

his first balloon ascents in the city, undertaking sixtraining flights during March and April 1896; andthe expedition leader – Salomon August Andrée –had also visited Paris on a number of occasions,once during the 1889 World Exhibition, an eventwhich itself featured two large tethered balloons asone of its main attractions (see Sollinger 2005).

On one level then, ascending in the Eutelsat bal-loon is part of an attempt to trace the distributedassemblage of process, material and experience –from envelope to ascension – through which theevent of the 1897 Andrée expedition continues toresonate. But the repeated and ‘ineffably embodiedprocess’ of ascension, even when tethered, is genera-tive – at least potentially – of differential affectsand divergent lines of thought (Wylie 2002, 445).And, as I seek to show in this paper, the repeatedevent of ascension of the Eutelsat balloon becomesimplicated in the movement of more than the Andréeexpedition: it begins to draw in and to becomeenveloped by accounts of other ascents, some actual,some fictitious, but all involving the differentialmovement of aerostatic things. And over time, theresonant after-effects of the experience of ascentcoalesce into a sustained attempt, narrated in thelines of what follows, to think through the multiplespaces of aerostatic things.

Introduction

In early June 1783, in Annonay, near Lyon, Josephand Etienne Montgolfier conducted the firstsuccessful public launch of a hot-air balloon.

2

With

a circumference of 110 feet, their balloon reachedan altitude of 6000 feet during a flight that lastedabout 10 minutes. By late August of the same yearthe Montgolfier brothers had a serious competitor:the physicist Jacques-Alexandre Charles made thefirst public ascent in Paris using hydrogen, or‘inflammable air’. While neither ascent involvedany living passengers, subsequent flights carriedanimals, before Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquisd’Arlandes became, on 20 November 1783, the firsthuman passengers to make a balloon ascent – in acraft designed by the Montgolfiers. These earlyballoon ascents generated enormous interest: indeed,depending upon the account read, the first flightsin Paris in 1783 were witnessed by anything from100 000 to 400 000 people (Kim 2004a; Rolt 2006;Olivetto 2007). In the months following, aerostaticthings became highly fashionable, their designreplicated in a range of popular materials andpractices: miniature balloons were all the rage,dresses and shirts were fabricated in the style ofthe aerostat, and artefacts from clocks to lampswere produced in the shape of the balloon (seeDessauce 1999; Topham 2002; Rolt 2006).

The interest generated by these events is hardlysurprising: as a technical transformation in thehuman experience of earth–atmosphere relations,the development of practical balloon flight markedthe public emergence of a distinctively novel wayof becoming and being mobile: one that wasgenuinely

aerostatic

. This paper narrates an accountof the distinctive spaces of materiality, movementand experience associated with the invention of

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these aerostatic things. In narrating this account, thepaper is intended as a contribution to and develop-ment of recent efforts to deepen conceptualisationsof the geographies of air and atmosphere. Clearly,these geographies have been the focus of a greatdeal of work by physical geographers. Yet theyhave received much less attention from humangeographers. This situation is, however, changingas human geographers become interested in airand atmosphere as zones in which a range ofimportant disciplinary concerns might be addressed.For instance, Fraser MacDonald (2006 2007) hasrecently argued that the critical orbit of geographybe extended to outer space, albeit in ways that

both

acknowledge a long-standing concern with earth–atmosphere relations within the discipline

and

develop this concern through greater attention to‘space’ as a sphere of geopolitical and technological‘geo-power’. At a lower altitude, but no less signifi-cantly, Peter Adey, Lucy Budd and Phil Hubbard(2007) have drawn attention to the value of engagingwith geographies of ‘aeromobility’ through a discus-sion of the social and cultural geographies of globalair travel. As they observe, while premised uponthe promise and dream of becoming mobile, flyingis very much routed through particular sites andspaces of surveillance and control which are, in turn,both facilitated by distributed technological assem-blages

and

generative of a range of distinctiveexperiences (see also Cresswell 2006; Adey 20042008). Yet, while increased attention is being paidto how aero-mobility is organised, regulated andcontrolled, arguably less is known about the specificityof experiences of being in and indeed of witnessingthings becoming airborne. Thus, as Adey

et al.

observe, the ‘embodied, emotional, and practisedgeographies [of airspace] remain to be adequatelycharted’ (2007, 774).

A key contention of the present paper is that anygeography of air and atmosphere needs to attendto the specificities of different techniques and tech-nologies of becoming airborne. The differencebetween aerostatic and aerodynamic flight is crucialhere (but see also Cwerner 2006). Understandably,the latter has garnered most contemporary attentionbecause of its speed and commercial importance.But aerostatic flight pre-dates its heavier than airrelation by well over a century. And, while the formeris often now understood in terms of amusementand pleasure, its development was crucial to theemergence of both ‘air’ and ‘atmosphere’ as technical-scientific, aesthetic and experiential spaces. Focusing

as it does upon aerostatic flight, and on the processthrough which things become lighter than air, thispaper therefore contributes to geographical under-standings of the differentiated emergence and experienceof airspace as a zone in which a range of cultural,technical and political questions are mobilised.

One point of departure for understanding aerostaticflight would be to situate it within a longstandingconcern with dreams of unearthly transcendence orgeo-strategic omniscience and the technologies ofvision designed to realise such dreams (see, forinstance, Newhall 1969; Cosgrove and Fox 2008).While this paper acknowledges and considers theimportance of aerostatic things as facilitatingtechniques of vision and observation, it developsan account of aerostatic space in two further ways.First, it engages with the distinctive

materiality

ofaerostatic things. In this respect, the paper alsodevelops and extends ongoing efforts within andbeyond geography to articulate conceptual vocabu-laries that provide purchase on the materialities ofspace and spacing (Latham and McCormack 2004;Whatmore 2006; Anderson and Wylie forthcom-ing). Specifically, the paper seeks to demonstratethat while the ‘object-ness’ of aerostatic bodies canbe de-centred through the terms of a relationalassemblage of forces and technical devices, thisdoes not preclude awareness of how the affectivemateriality of aerostatic bodies also registers throughwhat Jane Bennett calls ‘thing-power’: ‘the livelyenergy and/or resistant pressure that issues fromone material assemblage and is received by others’(2004, 347).

Then, and second, the paper demonstrates howthe materiality of things becoming lighter than airis generative of distinctive modes of experiencing –or sensing – aerostatic space. Here the paper takessome orientation from recent geographical efforts toapprehend how different configurations of affectivityand materiality can be traced via the senses andsensibilities of a range of practices and technologies:through work on somatic practices (McCormack2003), walking (Wylie 2005) and through sustainedreflections on the differentiated nature of mobility(Sheller 2004; Cresswell 2006; Adey 2006; Bissell2007). The upshot of such work is that the spaces ofmovement and mobility always involve more thanthe displacement of self-contained subjects or objectsthrough time-space: rather, what Nigel Thrift (2004)has called ‘movement-space’ can be apprehended asan assemblage of relations emerging from a distributedbackground of technologies and practices. In turn,

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this movement-space is sensed differentially, aprocess that is itself generatively constitutive ofdifferent subjectivities: in these terms, to sensemovement is a process of

spacing

. Drawing uponsuch work, the paper takes seriously, and works toexemplify, how aerostatic spacing can be appre-hended as a kind of distributed assemblage whoseaffective materialities are both pre-personal, while alsoregistering potentially as felt and sensed intensitieswithin and between bodies of different kinds. Thus,it exemplifies the logics of a processual materialismfrom which lighter than air things emerge in waysthat are generative of differential modes of

sensingaerostatic spacing

.The argument of the paper unfolds as follows.

The first part of the paper considers the distinctiveprocessual materiality of aerostatic things, beforesubsequent sections outline three dimensions ofaerostatic spacing: the specific modes of sensing-space of which the movement of aerostatic bodiesare generative; the differential vectors of affectivityin which the movement and materiality of aerostaticthings are involved; and the potential for aerostaticthings to ‘un-tether’ through the affective event –actual or anticipated – of vertigousness. The argumentsand discussion of the paper are illustrated withnotes and images drawn from that day spent withthe Eutelsat balloon in the Parc André Citroën. Atthe same time the discussion also incorporatesdetails and fragments from a range of historicaland contemporary accounts of aerostatic flight. Thearrangement and participation of both sources ofmaterial here is not intended to provide a com-prehensive account of the experience of aerostatic

flight: these sources are intended instead to providean opening onto different modes of questioningaerostatic spacing. Similarly, the style in which thepaper is written is not presented as a process ofgentle or steady uplift; it is, rather, a deliberate andperformative effort to inflect an account of aerostaticspace with a sense of the variability of its affectivecomposition. As such, the paper takes seriously acommitment to different modes of address andpresentation that, articulated in this journal andelsewhere (McCormack 2003; Wylie 2005; see alsoDe Silvey 2006; Lorimer 2003 2006), have becomeintegral to the ethos of geographical encounters withand within the affective movement and materialityof thinking space.

‘Concrete particular, hanging there’

The presence of the balloon is not always obvious asyou approach the point at which it is tethered. Forinstance, if, as you walk through the park, the balloonis on the ground, then you might not know it is there,waiting, primed for ascent. Conversely, when fullyascended, the balloon is difficult to miss from adistance – it stands out as a sphere (‘point’ is not quiteaccurate) of visual orientation in space, self-contained,suspended in distinction against the backdrop of the sky.But as you move towards the point at which the balloonis tethered, its sheer height causes it to disappear again:from near that point nothing remains but a thin line ofverticality, which draws one upwards, craning.

‘The balloon, beginning at a point on FourteenthStreet, the exact location of which I cannot reveal,expanded northward all one night, while people

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were sleeping, until it reached the Park’ (2003, 46).So begins Donald Barthelme’s description, in ashort story entitled

The Balloon

, of the suddenappearance and expansion of a vast aerostatic bodyover Manhattan until it covers much of the island.The unexpected appearance of this balloon provokesmany responses, from the intellectual, the affective,to the tactile–kinaesthetic. And as the narrator ofthe story also notes, ‘people began, in a curious way,to locate themselves in relation to aspects of theballoon’ (2003, 50). Yet as the account of the eventof its appearance unfolds, it quickly becomes clearthat little agreement exists about the real significanceor purpose of the balloon. Indeed, before long, anysearch for the true meaning of the balloon, or thesituation of which it is generative, subsides. All ofwhich it is possible to speak, in terms of the eventof the appearance of this balloon is, as Barthelmeobserves, a ‘concrete particular, hanging there’(2003, 46).

On one level Barthelme’s story points deliberatelyto the absurdity of trying to tie down the meaning

of any given event. As such,

The Balloon

can andhas been read as an archetypal postmodern parablethrough its exemplification of rhizomatic logics ofexpansion and connection (Childs 2006). Conversely,Barthelme’s story foregrounds the distinctiveaspect of the sheer fact of the presence of a balloonin the sky – the fact of its ‘hanging there’. So whileBarthelme’s balloon is stripped of meaning, it retainsa certain quality of object-ness, the sheer fact of thepresence of which registers through different sensoryregisters. Yet even if a balloon is apprehensible as adiscrete, self-contained object, it is a badly behavedone. It certainly does not meet those standards ofdurability and persistence through which thecategory of object-ness often tends to be defined (seeHitchings 2006). Indeed, a balloon – and especiallywhen first apprehended by those late eighteenth-century passengers and earthbound spectators –seems to call into question the very qualities oftenassociated with object-ness: weight, stability, con-creteness and inertia. The matter of a balloon seemsof a different, more whimsical nature: possessingthe capacity to lift, while also quickly deflatable.

So, as Barthelme’s story illustrates, there issomething obdurately buoyant about the matter ofan aerostatic body: something more than sheermovement and something less than object-hood.How then might the distinctive materiality of thispresence be understood? One way, following thework of John Law (2002) involves de-centring theobject-ness of an aerostatic body, to think of it as aset of processes and associations through which themateriality of this body comes to cohere. Threeprocesses are of particular significance here. Thefirst is

envelopment

. At its most basic a balloon is anenvelope for the capture and containment of alift-generating gas of one kind or another. Earlyexperiments with balloon flight employed a rangeof different materials with which to fabricate suchan envelope. The first Montgolfier balloons wereconstructed from sections of paper and cloth(usually linen and silk), often with buttoned seams.In contrast, Charles’s hydrogen-filled balloons werefabricated from a fine silk covered with a rubbersolution: this produced a less permeable envelope,crucial for a craft whose gas could not be replenishedduring flight. But the matter of envelopmentinvolves more than choosing the right kind of fabric:it is also a process at the heart of which is a certainrelation of materiality to its ongoing differentiation.This relation is a matter of what Gilles Deleuze(1993) calls ‘the fold’: an abstract line along which

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materiality is inflected. While the fold is transversalto a range of techniques and technologies of world-making, Deleuze – and following him BernardCache (1995) – draw particular attention to art andarchitecture as techniques through which the foldsof matter are drawn out and expressed. Similarly, theemergence of the balloon through the experimentsof Montgolfier and Charles can be understood interms of the fold of materiality: not just in the sensethat a certain kind of material becomes a containerfor another, but in the sense that envelopment isgenerative of a distinctive way in which materialityrelates to the process of its own becoming, potentially,aerostatic.

In turn, envelopment provides the necessarypotentialising condition for the process of

inflation

(Dessauce 1999; Topham 2002). Clearly, inflationdid not begin with the late eighteenth-centuryemergence of aerostatic flight. But the degree towhich it facilitated the process of things becominglighter than air was related closely to contempora-neous scientific experiments with the properties ofvarious gaseous matters: throughout the second halfof the eighteenth century, science had expanded therange of ‘air’ available for purposes of inflation(Kim 2004b). The exact properties of these gaseswere not always clear, however: the Montgolfiersexperimented with the combustion of substancessuch as wool and straw in the mistaken hope theywould discover the optimal lifting gas when allthey were really doing was generating hot air.Charles, in contrast, chose to inflate his balloonswith hydrogen, a gas whose existence had beenacknowledged for centuries but had only beenrecognised as a discrete element in 1766, and onlynamed by Antoine Lavoisier in 1783.

3

Buoyancy

, the third process of which aerostaticthings consist, marks the point at which the possi-bilities inherent in envelopment and inflation areactualised through dynamic relation with atmosphere.Buoyancy is reducible neither to the matter of thegas with which the envelope is inflated nor to thepermeability of the envelope itself, but their dynamicinteraction with temperature, sunlight, precipitation,and pressure. So while we may speak of the buoyancyof an aerostatic

body

, buoyancy is a thoroughlyrelational process. As such, it can be apprehendedin terms of the affective cartography emergingfrom the work of first, Spinoza (1989) and, followinghim Deleuze (1990). Put briefly, bodies, at least inDeleuze’s reading of Spinoza, are not defined in termsof the kind of matter of which they are composed.

Rather, they can be defined along two axes. Thefirst of these is kinetic, and refers to the relationsof ‘speed and slowness’ from which a body iscomposed. The second axis is dynamic, and refersto the capacity that a body has to affect, and beaffected by, other bodies. Defined thus, the categoryof body is extended beyond the sphere of discretethings: bodies, following Spinoza, can be gusts ofwind or volumes of gas. Both can be defined interms of kinetic relations: by relations of speed andslowness – the velocity and energy of molecules,differential temperature and pressure gradients.And both can be defined dynamically in terms oftheir capacity to affect other bodies (see McCormack2008).

The object-ness of a balloon can therefore bedecomposed into a processual and affective mater-ialism through the logics of envelopment, inflationand buoyancy. Yet in the process, it is importantnot to let something else disappear: the fact of thepresence of the balloon as a ‘concrete particular,hanging there’. For it is precisely this fact that wasso crucial to the affective spaces generated by thefirst balloon ascents. Those who gathered in Paris towatch those ascents may well have had a deep-seated interest in the spectacle of scientific andtechnological progress. But one suspects that theywere also drawn, in affective anticipation, by theprospect of witnessing the process of this aerostaticthing becoming lighter than air. How then to con-ceive of an aerostatic body in terms of a processualmaterialism while also affirming the affective fact ofits potential presence? One way is by acknowledgingthe quality and force of what political theorist JaneBennett (2004) has called

thing-power

. For Bennett,thing-power designates a quality of materiality,which, while always emergent from relationalassemblages, nevertheless has a sufficient degree ofstability and obduracy with which to exercise adegree of affective difference within the world (seealso Hawkins and Mueke 2003). In the kind of livelymaterialism Bennett conjures up through the conceptof thing-power,

Each thing is individuated, but also located within anassemblage – each is shown to be in a relationship withthe others, and also with the sunlight and the street,and not simply with me, my vision, or my culturalframe. Here thing-power rises to the surface. In thisassemblage, objects appear more vividly as things, thatis, as entities not entirely reducible to the contexts inwhich (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhaustedby their semiotics. (2004, 254)

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For Bennett then, to foreground thing-power is notto assert the primacy of the

thing in itself

– it is,rather, to apprehend how, within a given assemblageof agencies and actors, certain kinds of thingsemerge, however temporarily, with a degree ofpersistency, buoyancy and obduracy. Here, thing-power is not juxtaposed to a processual materialism:instead, the former is always an immanent extrusiveexpression of the latter. And while Bennett’sargument is articulated in the context of thepossibility of opening up the materiality of politicalthinking to the force of distinctive kinds ofagencies, in the context of this paper it can be putto work in order to rethink the affective materialityof aerostatic space in terms that are relational andprocessual while also remaining attentive to whatis distinctive about the apparent presence and forceof aerostatic things.

Sensing aerostatic space

As the gondola continues to rise, a view beginspresenting itself, the park becoming map-like, geo-metrical in aspect. Now, for a time, attention shifts toland-marking, feature finding. Felt movement becomesless obvious, becoming the still swaying of gentle,tethered ascent, increasing in amplitude as the balloonrises above the shelter of surrounding buildings; feltthrough the sense of the ground falling away; and feltthrough the sense, as the balloon rises, of thingsbecoming aerostatic.

In the months and weeks following those firstpublic ascents in 1783, the affective thing-power ofthe balloon could be defined in terms of the sheer

novelty of its presence as an object visible in thesky. And, at least from the ground, the experienceof balloon ascent became a collective event ofspectacular witnessing. Yet the invention of theaerostat also provided new possibilities for sensingaerostatic space for those privileged or foolhardyenough to travel by balloon. Vision was obviouslycentral to this. Using ascension or elevation as ameans of gaining a more privileged view or vantagepoint from which to gaze upon the earth wasclearly nothing new: the balloon, however, offereda novel combination of elevation, vision andmobility, with a distinguishing feature being theabsence of any ground underfoot that might obscurethe view directly below. Aerostatic flight could beunderstood therefore as a particularly opportuneexperience through which to develop and enhancethe scope of the scientific gaze. As aeronaut andscientist James Glaisher put it, ‘the balloon gratifiedthe desire natural to us all to view the earth in anew aspect’ (cited in Holt 2006, 83). Glaisher’s com-ments indicate how balloon flight could be and wasunderstood as a literal enactment of philosophicaltranscendence. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, the imageof the platonic philosopher is ‘a being of ascents;he is the one who leaves the cave and rises up. Themore he rises the more he is purified’ (1990, 127).Such dreams of transcendence through ascensionalso resonate with one of the foundational narra-tives of the Christian tradition, and with variousstrands of Enlightenment philosophy, in which thepursuit of knowledge is a movement upward, anattainment of an ideal elevated position free from thegrasp of gravity (see Wylie 2002).

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Insofar as balloon ascent provided a way ofrealising these dreams of transcendence, it did sothrough a space of vision already framed by adistinctly cartographic way of seeing landscape.Certainly, the view presented by such flights wasoften articulated in terms that described the worldbelow as ‘map-like’. Thus, as Glaisher recorded afteranother ascent,

The view was indeed wonderful: the plan-like appearanceof London and its suburbs; the map-like appearance ofthe country generally, and the winding Thames,leading the eye to the white cliffs at Margate and on toDover, were sharply defined. Brighton was seen, andthe sea beyond, and all the coast line up to Yarmouth.The north was obscured by clouds . . . Railway trainswere like creeping things, caterpillar-like, and the steamlike a narrow line of serpentine mist. All the dockswere mapped out, and every object of moderate sizewas clearly seen with the naked eye. Taking a grandview of the whole visible area underneath, I was struckby its great regularity. (Glaisher, in Freedgood 2000, 89)

Such accounts situate the experience of balloonflight in problematic relation to a variety of practicesthrough which ascension is linked with the desireto attain a cartographic view free from the graspof earthly everyday life (de Certeau 1984). And ifaerostatic ascent provided the possibility of realisingsuch cartographic ways of seeing by transcendingthe bounds of the earth, the invention of photo-graphy provided a visual technology throughwhich this view could be captured and put to gooduse: indeed, the emergence of aerial photographywas intertwined closely with the ongoing develop-ment of the balloon in the nineteenth century (see

also Newhall 1969). The French photographer Nadar(whose real name was Félix Tournachon) was thefirst to explore the possibilities of aerial photo-graphy, filing a patent for the aerial photograph in1858. And while Nadar’s photographs began afashion for birds-eye views of cities, they alsoanticipated the possibility of employing aerostaticphotography for the purposes of military surveillance(Rolt 2006).

Tethered or ‘captive’ balloons provided a safer,tamed version of aerostatic flight as visual experience.During the last three decades of the nineteenthcentury such balloons were installed in many cities,their presence often coinciding with the organisationof international expositions: Barcelona (1888),Budapest (1896), Buenos Aires (1888), Chicago (1891),Copenhagen (1891), Leipzig (1897), Mexico (1893), Nice(1884, 1890), Paris (1889, 1895), Rome (1890), Turin(1884, 1898).

4

The fashion for the installation of such tetheredballoons was initiated in Paris. Le Géant – a balloondesigned by Nadar – was a central attraction at the1867 exhibition. A much larger balloon featured atthe 1878 Paris World Fair, becoming a landmarkeven when not in the air: ‘from the Gardens of theTuilleries one sees it when the cable is altogetherwound up, and the car touching the ground, tower-ing like a great cupola above the highest point ofthe Palace’ (

New York Times

1878). Designed byHenri Giffard, this captive balloon carried about35 000 passengers during its operation. With acapacity of 883 000 cubic feet, it was one of thelargest balloons ever constructed, and wouldascend to an altitude of 500–700 metres, carrying

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up to 50 people for about 20 minutes (Rolt 2006).And again the view:

from the altitude to which the balloon rose this eveningParis resembled the Indian Shawl at the Exhibition,having for its subject a pictorial plan of the town ofCashmere and its environs. It was purple with the glowof the setting sun. (

New York Times

1878)

It could be argued therefore that the advent of theballoon provides a distinctive mode of remotelysensing defined by logics of vision and visibility:one through which the dream of an all-seeingviewpoint from which to observe, locate and mapis realised. Furthermore, it could also be arguedthat the alignment of aerostatic and photographictechnologies marks that point at which airspacebegins to feature within techniques and technologiesof surveillance, anticipating much later develop-ments (Bishop and Phillips 2002; Kaplan 2006). Yet,while vision is the most obvious sensory registerinvolved in aerostatic flight, it would be a mistaketo reduce the sensing-space of aerostatic flight tothese logics. As John Wylie (2002) has demonstrated,while often framed by dreams of transcendence,the process of ascension remains a matter ofcorporeal involvement in the sensuous materialityof world. Admittedly, such a claim appears difficultto sustain in the case of ascent by balloon: thispractice seemed to allow the observer to transcendearthbound corporeality in a way that moreconventional practices of ascension and elevation –most obviously by walking – could not: this, after all,was elevation without corporeal effort, ascensionwithout redemptive slog.

Yet the absence of obvious effort or exertion doesnot mean the experience of ascension by balloon isany less corporeal than, say, the experience ofwalking or climbing up a hill. It does, however,involve distinctive and distinctively novel modesof sensing movement and stillness. The experienceof tethered balloons was, in this respect, rathergentle:

The motion of the balloon in a very faint breeze wasanalogous to that of a peg-top when it is near falling. Itdeviated from the vertical line far enough to have beensuspended over Notre Dame, Rue du Bac, and the RueRoyale. Some of the ascensionists grew a little nervouswhen the balloon, having got to the end of its tether,jerked and strained a little. Nobody complained ofgiddiness. The descent was safely and pleasantlyaccomplished both yesterday and this evening. (

NewYork Times

1878)

The experience of free balloon flight was ratherdifferent, due in part to the disquieting disjunctionbetween the visual and kinaesthetic registers ofsensing. The upward movement of the balloon, soobvious to those observing it from the ground, didnot necessarily translate into a strong sense of motionfelt within the bodies of airborne passengers. Theapparent absence of felt movement is due to thefact that a free balloon moves with and at the samespeed as the wind. Thus, in Spinozist terms, amoving body of enveloped gas and a moving bodyof wind are in almost complete ‘agreement’ – theformer moves with the latter. And as a result, theaerostatic balloon does not just provide a vehiclewith which to experience movement through theair: it is also generative of a novel mode of sensingstillness in motion. The pioneering aviator AlbertSantos-Dumont describes this mode of sensing thus:‘We were off, going at the speed of the air currentin which we now lived and moved. Indeed for us,there was no more wind; and this is the first greatfact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is thisunfelt movement forward and upward’ (Dumont, inHoffman 2003, 41). Crucially, this is a mode of stillnessnot defined in opposition to movement (see Bissell2007). Nor, indeed, is it stillness created throughthe intentional effort of an individual subject. Thisstillness in movement is itself the outcome of amobile, distributed and processual assemblage.

5

‘Balloonacy’ and benign objects of amusement

Your relation to the fact of the balloon’s ascending anddescending varies depending upon whether you are:anticipating the prospect of ascent; contemplating theafter-affects of ascending-descending; hanging out inthe park; passing through the park; being in the parkbetween ascents. In the case of the latter the temptationis to position yourself in relation to the balloon fromany number of angles, to observe it from here, there,and everywhere. And to observe it being observed.

From the outset, there were great expectations andhigh hopes for aerostatic things. Their adventprovided a spectacularly public demonstration ofthe power of science. And, to some degree, suchexpectations have been realised: thus, combinedwith the radiosonde, aerostatic things provide animportant way of rendering visible the processualmateriality of which the earth’s atmosphereconsists. Yet, after a period of initial buoyancy, thesubsequent affective story of aerostatic spacing can

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be read as a process of gentle deflation interruptedby episodes in which the balloon has been employed– sometimes spectacularly – as a vehicle of hope.

Of these, two episodes stand out. The first is theSiege of Paris in 1870, during which balloons wereemployed to carry mail and people out of the city:such was their success that popular enthusiasm forballoon flight was briefly re-inflated (Fisher 1965).A second episode was the 1897 Swedish AndréeExpedition to the North Pole (Swedish Society forAnthropology and Geography 1931). While thecredibility and feasibility of the expedition was theobject of a great deal of critical scrutiny, it becamea vehicle through which the hopes and aspirationof Swedish nationalism were articulated (Wråkberg1999). Yet the fantastical nature of the expeditionand its subsequent disappearance seemed only toconfirm the impracticality and foolhardiness ofusing aerostatic travel. Indeed, its credibility hadbeen tarnished by association with various hoaxes:the most famous of these was Edgar Allen Poe’s(1844/1976) fictional account, published as fact inthe

New York Sun

, of a successful three-day ballooncrossing of the Atlantic by a certain Monck Mason.Both the imaginative appeal of Andrée’s balloonexpedition and the degree of incredulity it pro-voked also stemmed from its resonance with thenarratives and themes of Jules Verne’s work. Oneof Verne’s early novels,

Five Weeks in a Balloon

(1863/2002) had featured the adventures of a Britishexpedition flying from across Africa. Such accountscontributed to the popular imagining, throughoutthe nineteenth century, of the balloon as an objectcirculating within a space of fantasy and adventure(Freedgood 2000). In this context, the passage ofAndrée’s balloon expedition exemplifies the degreeto which aerostatic things had gone from objects ofscientific credibility to vehicles of ‘balloonacy’, orat best to benign objects of spectacular distraction.

The extent of this transformation is demon-strated in Buster Keaton’s 1923 film

The Balloonatic

,in which a gas-filled balloon becomes a comic vehi-cle for Keaton’s adventures. The film begins in the‘House of Trouble’, before the action moves to afairground, where Keaton pursues the affections ofa female character (Phyllis). After his advances arerebuffed, Keaton wanders out of the fairgroundand sees a tethered balloon surrounded by a smallgroup of distinguished-looking gentlemen. At theirrequest, and with the aid of a ladder, Keatonclimbs on top of the envelope, apparently to makesome minor repairs and adjustments. At this point

the balloon is inadvertently untethered, and, with-out realising it at first, Keaton finds himself adriftalone above the city. Briefly, this upper surface ofthe envelope becomes a stage upon which Keatonperforms, the passage ending when, after climbingdown into the basket, he ends up shooting a hole inthe envelope: predictably, both the balloon andKeaton then crash to earth in a rural setting. After

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more comic capers in the wilderness, the balloonmysteriously reappears at the end of the film,saving Keaton and Phyllis from a lethal plunge overa waterfall.

In Keaton’s film the balloon is more than anobject and less than the driver of a narrative: itworks as vehicle for the passage between differentgestural affects, demonstrating further the degreeto which the status of the balloon had transformedby the beginning of the twentieth century. This storyof gentle deflation and inflation exemplified byKeaton’s treatment of the balloon could be continuedin various ways. It could be traced, for instance,through the manner in which things becominglighter than air participate in the material productionof affective atmospheres – from giant inflatablefloats in street parades to small helium-filled balloonsat children’s parties. And it could also be tracedthrough attending to how aerostatic things havebecome part of the spatial logics of advertising,from the Goodyear Blimp to the more recent use ofballoons in advertising campaigns of variouskinds.

6

Yet, as the final section of this paper aims todemonstrate, the affective qualities of aerostaticspace do not necessarily always consist of the gentledeflation and inflation of hope and amusementthrough the ‘soft imperceptible sighing of gas throughthe valves’ (Barthelme 2003, 46): they sometimestake place with a bang.

Untethering: the affective event of vertigousness

And so the cable arrests, the balloon shuddering still.High enough, and a view which, it has to be said, is not

unpleasing to the cartographic eye. And yet thereremains a lingering sense of unease. Despite the eleva-tion, this sense of unease is not about the possibility,however unlikely, of falling. It is more disquieting thanthe prospect of sheer height. Nor is it about the expanseof view. It is felt most intensely not when looking outor down: rather, it registers when, standing back, onelooks through the rigging, to the underside of theenvelope and the space beyond.

The prospect of infinity was one of the moreunsettling aspects of aerostatic flight: free balloon-ing, in particular, involved coming to terms witha new kind of immersive experience, a sense,potentially overwhelming, of the vastness of atmo-spheric space, of the fact that ‘there is more of thevisible than there should be’ (Wylie 2002, 451). AsElaine Freedgood (2000) has argued, however, tomove through the atmosphere was to experiencethe sublimity of vision and visibility in a ratherdifferent way than that offered, for instance, by theexperience of altitude and elevation in mountainousregions. This was an experience emergent from amovement-space distributed between body, cable,gondola, envelope and atmosphere while simulta-neously generative of differential qualities of sensedstillness and weightlessness. As Santos-Dumontput it, the balloonist seemed ‘to float withoutweight, without a surrounding world, a soul freedfrom the weight of matter!’ (cited in Hoffman 2003,41).

Odilon Redon’s 1882 lithograph, ‘L’oeil, commeun ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’Infini’ (‘The eye,like a strange balloon, moves toward Infinity’)appears – at least at first glance – as a pre-surrealrendering of this prospect of transcendence through

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aerostatic space (see Jirat-Wasiutynski 1992).

7

Ithas all the necessary elements: a balloon-like eye,suspended in the air, gazing towards the heavens.Yet there is something less then benign about theheavenward prospect of this strange, aerostaticbody: something about the immensity of the fieldthrough which vision extends. Redon’s balloon-eyeseems untethered yet simultaneously in a steadystate of suspension between heaven and earth. Thefact of its apparent suspension should not be taken,however, as evidence of a condition of benignequilibrium. The movement of aerostatic things isinherently unstable: left to their own devices, theytend to ascend or descend in relation to prevailingatmospheric conditions. Uplift can result from rapidwarming of the envelope, with the density of the gaswithin becoming much less than the surroundingatmosphere, or from a sudden gust of wind.Regardless of the cause, the disquietude of whichRedon’s paintings speak is not just the prospect ofthe weightless, limitless gaze of which aerostaticthings are generative. They also pre-empt theprospect of becoming untethered: felt and sensedaffectively as the

anticipation

of the potential formovement – for sudden, rapid, uncontrolled ascent(see Massumi 2005; Anderson 2007; Adey 2008).This felt sense lurks within the process of thingsbecoming lighter than air as a barely-sensed uneaseimmanent to claims for ascension as transcendence.As an affective complex, this is not quite fear. Noris it vertigo, even if it is vertiginous nonetheless. Itis felt as the body’s sensed anticipation in thepresent of the future event of untethered uplift: an‘uprush of the unconscious’ (Redon in Werner 2005, 8).And for good reason:

October 1912, Berlin: ‘Gericke and Steler were making atrial flight to test the new balloon which they expectedto use in the International races. [. . .] When a mile inthe air, their craft was caught in an eddy and becameunmanageable. After a terrific plunge straight upward,the bag burst with a loud explosion. Both men droppedthree miles to the ground and were dead when pickedup. [. . .] The recording apparatus showed that theywere riding at a height of 6000 feet when they weresuddenly hit with a vertical gust of wind which pushedthem straight up with a violence of a hurricane to aheight of over 15 000 ft. [. . .] The balloon embodied allthe latest ideas in gas-bag construction.’ (

New YorkTimes

1912)

June 2003, Germany: ‘A helium balloon, swept from itsmoorings by sudden winds in Germany, snagged afive-year-old British girl and carried her for 44 miles

to her death entangled in its cables.’ (

The Independent

2003)

County Durham, July 2004: ‘Onlookers at a park inChester-le-Street, County Durham, have described howa large, inflatable sculpture rose from the ground andcrashed down killing two people. It is thought up to 30people could have been inside the structure at the time,and the park had up to 500 people enjoying the fineweather.’ (BBC website July 2006)

The movement of aerostatic bodies – even inpotential – therefore becomes anticipated throughthe felt sense of vertiginous events. And what ofthese events? Of what do they speak? Trans-formation? Perhaps. Rupture? Resistance? Hardly.They are not necessarily of any more semioticsignificance than the fact of the balloon as ‘concreteparticular, hanging there’. They disclose variableconjunctions of affects and forces, whose outcomesare never predetermined, yet whose affects are felt,even in anticipation, as movement registering, andresonating, across, within and between the sensingspaces of bodies: bodies ascending, descending,falling to the ground. This is precisely what happensin the pages of Ian McEwan’s (1998) novel

Enduring Love

. McEwan’s novels are of course allabout events: about their anticipation, their effects,about they way in which ‘they unhinge’ relationsbetween bodies (1998, 3; see also Crosthwaith2007). And

Enduring Love

is about the event of whichthe sudden appearance of ‘an enormous balloonfilled with helium’ is generative. Unlike Barthelme’sballoon, however, the disturbing and interruptivepresence of the aerostatic body of which McEwanwrites is not defined in terms of the fact of its‘concrete particular, hanging there’. McEwan’s balloonbecomes, instead, an event-space of affectiverelations drawing in and enveloping other bodies.It drags across the Oxfordshire countryside, with aboy in the basket, chased by the boy’s grandfather.The latter is helped by a chaotic conjunction ofindividuals who, just at the moment they thinkthey have managed to hold down the balloon, areaffected by a sudden gust of wind. Lifted into theair, they all hang, suspended, between ‘one or twoungrounded seconds’ and ‘ruthless gravity’ (McEwan1998, 13). And all but one lets go. Uplift. In theprocess, everything is transformed. Things beingand becoming lighter than air disclose a vertiginousaffective event sensed as the sudden apprehensionof the ‘generation of multiplicity and variety ofmatter in the universe, including ourselves and allour thoughts’ (1998, 4).

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Conclusion

The longer you linger in the park the more the balloonfades into the upground. And, as it does, other detailsbegin to distract: a small, blue balloon perhaps, blowngently by the breeze along the surface of one of a seriesof regular rectangular pools. And you might begin tofilm this balloon. And a small boy might watch youwatching a balloon and be prompted to ask, in French:why, sir, are you filming a balloon?

In a remarkable piece of cartographic writing,Michel Serres (1975) invites us to consider strangejourneys. Serres is concerned specifically with thestrange journeys about which Jules Verne writes,involving a ‘technology of vehicles and communica-tion’, including balloons and aerostats. For Serres,these kinds of journeys are never just imaginative:they are ‘voyages through a plurality of spaces, bymeans of an exfoliated multiplicity of maps. Onemust lose oneself from space to space, from circleto circle, from map to map, from world-map toworld-map. According to change, along the thread,following the warp and woof’ (1975, 177). It is onething to cross a continent or circle a globe in aballoon. But up and down – albeit thrice – in atethered balloon? What kind of a strange journey isthis? While obviously vertical, perhaps it is best tothink of it as a series of movements around andalong the surface of the process of things becominglighter than air. Along this surface, folds, bulges,inflections and extrusions might appear – as they

do on Barthelme’s balloon – affording opport-unities for thinking aerostatic space. In this way,and without ever bearing the weight of a universalaerostatic subject-position, even the journey oftethered verticality along a tensile cable might openonto a multiplicity of modes of thinking aboutaerostatic space. It is more appropriate, however,to speak of aerostatic

spacing

than of aerostaticspace – for aerostatic spacing enfolds differentways of being and becoming lighter than air.

Thinking this spacing requires a recognition thataerostatic things move between the logics of aprocessual materialism and the force of what JaneBennett calls ‘thing-power’. Put another way, theaffective materiality of aerostatic spacing is trans-versal to process and thing. It moves through logicsof envelopment, inflation and buoyancy, theseterms designating both relations of materiality toits own becoming and a vocabulary of affectivevectors. Yet while always in composition, the affectivemateriality of an aerostatic body also has a certainkind of force defined in terms of its individuatedconsistency – the fact of its ‘hanging there’. Crucially,aerostatic thing-power is not reducible to the termsof semiotic significance: nor is it to be understoodprimarily in terms of the production and circulationof imagined geographies, even if, as the work of Poeand Verne illustrates, such imagined geographiescan become participants in the differential inflationor deflation of the atmospheres of expectancy andhope through which specific aerostatic vehicles

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move. Aerostatic thing-power can be apprehendedin part, then, through the affective vectors of whichthe movement of things becoming lighter than airare generative. It consists of the capacity for certainprocesses to become generative of bodies with thecapacity to distract, to amuse, to enchant and todisturb.

8

Even without travelling in a balloon, it ispossible to have felt the sense – in potential – ofthis uplift, perhaps through the sight of the heliumballoon ungripped, moving skyward in untetheredascent.

As such, this paper has also suggested that thesensing-spaces of aerostatic things are always morethan visual, always in excess of dreams of trans-cendence, or the desire for an effort-free elevatedviewpoint. Clearly, vision is crucial to these sensing-spaces: yet vision is always enfolded into the torsionalconfigurations of movement and stillness of whichthe world consists (Deleuze 1993; Wylie 2005). Andthe visions and visibilities of aerostatic spacing arealways emerging from and within the processualmateriality of aerostatic thing-power. Crucially,insofar as aerostatic thing-power is sensed, thissensing is felt – sometimes only in anticipation – asmuch as it is seen. Indeed it is only by developing amore expanded notion of sensing-spacing that themore disquieting affectivities of things in differentialcomplexes of movement and stillness can be appre-hended. And in working towards this, the presentpaper has endeavoured to demonstrate that theaffective materiality of aerostatic bodies does notjust involve the presence and circulation of benignobjects of amusement and distraction: aerostaticspace – itself always in variable composition – ispopulated also by ‘terrifying, inert and banefulthings’ (Hennequin in Werner 2005, 7) whose poweris defined in terms of their capacity to draw in andredistribute the relations between bodies movingat different speeds and with different degrees ofconsistency.

This narration of aerostatic spacing is not, ofcourse, exhaustive. By way of conclusion, it is worthpointing to three lines along which such an accountmight be developed further, and in ways thatconnect with other concerns within and beyond thediscipline. First, and most obviously, as part ofan ongoing differentiation of the geographies ofairspace (Adey

et al.

2007), the question of howaerostatic things have been implicated in all kindsof spatial visions and experiences could bedeveloped further – from the mass balloon races ofthe early twentieth century (Holt 2006) to military

airships and barrage balloons, to utopian dreamsof lighter than air inflatable cities and structures inthe work of figures such as Peter Cook, Ron Herronand Graham Stevens (Alison

et al.

2007). Suchwork could also examine the relations between theprocessual logics of aerostatic things and theemergence, distribution and circulation of affectiveatmospheres. In these terms inflation, deflation andbuoyancy might be understood – and felt – assimultaneously affective and material. The role ofart and architecture is particularly important here,as the work of Usman Haque illustrates. In ‘SkyEar’ (2004) Haque released a ‘cloud’ of 1000 heliumballoons into the air at the Greenwich MaritimeMuseum in London. Each balloon contained LEDsand a mobile phone. Visitors could call the phones,an act which transformed the electromagneticrelations – and also colour – within the ‘cloud’.This work was developed further in ‘Open Burble’(2006) in which a similar cloud was released abovethe sky as part of the Singapore Biennale, and in‘Burble London’ (2007). Hasque describes thiswork thus:

In Open Burble, members of the public come togetherto compose, assemble and control an immense rippling,glowing, bustling ‘Burble’ that sways in the eveningsky, in response to the crowd interacting below. Thismassive structure, the form of which the public hasthemselves designed, exists at such a large scale that itis able to compete visually in an urban context with theskyscrapers that surround it.

9

Second, the role aerostatic things play in attemptsto render explicit the materiality of air andatmosphere could be developed further, and inways that complicate the distinction between thephysical and the human (see also Sloterdijk 2005).Important here is the ongoing significance ofaerostatic things as technologies for monitoring andmaking visible processes of atmospheric circulationand change through the use of weather balloons.

10

Equally, aerostatic things have been used as a wayof rendering visible the atmosphere as a zone of

public

concern. A 2005 TV advertising campaign,produced as an initiative of the Victoria StateGovernment in Australia, exemplifies this. The ‘Blackballoon’ campaign features helium-filled balloonsemerging from a variety of domestic appliances.

11

As the advert unfolds, more and more balloonsappear, and are seen escaping skyward into theatmosphere. The voiceover observes that each‘balloon represents 50 grams of greenhouse gas’,

Aerostatic spacing

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and the ‘average home creates 200 000 balloonsevery year’. This ad has an obviously politicalpurpose, one that might be contested critically invarious ways. Its significance here, however, is thatit illustrates how the thing-power of aerostaticbodies can become a lively participant in efforts torender visible the materiality of climate change – inthat sense the black balloons are part of the con-stitution of the atmosphere as an issue around whicha particular affective-material public emerges (seeMarres forthcoming).

Third, and finally, thinking about aerostaticthings and aerostatic space has the potential tocontribute to the ongoing elaboration of a geopoeticsof air, that element which, as Luce Irigaray (2002)has argued, is so easily forgotten in the context ofattempts to think through place as ground. Such ageopoetics would involve the apprehension not somuch of a space in and through which differentforms of life move: rather, air would be apprehendedas a constitutive and turbulent participant in thedistributed natures of lively worlds. Nor would thisgeopoetics operate on the basis of rigid juxtapositionof air with ground, but would take as its point ofdeparture the claim that both are always alreadymiscible (see also Ingold 2006). As Steven Connor(2007) has argued, there are a range of ways inwhich such a geopoetics of air can be apprehended– through the distinctive qualities of atmosphere,exhaust, smog, haze and breath – each of whichmixes the affective and material through logics thatdemand the cultivation of distinctive repertoires ofthinking spacing in processual terms. By narratingan account of aerostatic spacing as an ongoingprocess, from which aerostatic bodies emerge with adistinctive kind of affective thing-power – enveloped,

inflated and buoyant – this paper has endeavouredto contribute to the cultivation of such repertoires.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Gail Davies, Alison Blunt andthree referees for their constructive comments onan earlier draft of this paper. My thanks to PeterAdey for suggestions about literature of aeromobility.I am also grateful to the Victorian Government’sDepartment of Sustainability and Environment forpermission to reproduce a still from their ‘You havethe power: Save energy’ TV campaign. I have madeevery effort to identify the copyright owner of Keaton’s

The Balloonatic

, but to the best of my knowledge thiscopyright has lapsed. The remaining photographsin this paper were taken by myself. All errors andomissions are my own. The paper draws uponresearch funded by a British Academy Small Grant.

Notes

1

Aérophile

operates a number of similar aerostats in avarious cities.

2 This, of course, is not to ignore the earlier existenceof sky-lanterns in Asia, particularly in China, wherethey are often known as Kongming lanterns.

3 Indeed, prior to the experiments by Charles, hydrogenhad only ever been produced in minute quantities: itwas the very promise of aerostatic flight that generatedan imperative to produce large volumes of the gas bymixing sulphuric acid with iron filings (Austerfield1990, Langins 1983).

4 See http://www.aerophile.com/article/15/25/tethered-balloons-around-the-world-in-19th-century (last accessed16 December 2007).

5 This experience also anticipates the sense of weight-lessness of which space flight is generative.

http://www.aerophile.com/article/15/25/tethered-balloons-around-the-world-in-19th-century

http://www.aerophile.com/article/15/25/tethered-balloons-around-the-world-in-19th-century

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6 The 2007 Ford Mondeo Campaign is a notable example.Set in London, the ad depicts a world in which everycar but the Mondeo is lifted into the sky via clustersof brightly coloured, helium-filled balloons. Accordingto

Brand Barometer

, Ford’s ‘buzz score’ rose from +6to +10 during May 2007, with the ‘rise mostly due tothe ad’. See http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/663845/Brand-barometer---Balloon-ads-really-off-Ford(last accessed 15 March 2008).

7 At the time of writing, this lithograph was on displayat Museum of Modern Art, New York. See http://www.moma.org (last accessed 21 August 2008).

8 See, for instance, the wonderful 1935 animated short

Balloon Land

, in which the Pincushion Man terrifiesthe inflated inhabitants.

9 See http://www.haque.co.uk (last accessed 15 July 2008).10 See, for instance, the French Centre Nationale

D’Études Spatiales, http://www.cnes.fr/web/3641-stratospheric-balloons.php (last accessed 15 July 2008).

11 See http://www.saveenergy.vic.gov.au/getthefacts/whatisblackballoon.aspx. Last accessed 15 March2008. This ad was part of the ‘You have the power:Save energy’ television campaign.

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