Ventifacts
We name our winds for elsewhere, and ride them like a song forward into an aromatic future. Yet the time wind inhabits is too slow and spacious for the human eye; its undulations span generations and its unrelenting nature cannot begin to comprehend our puny endurance. An immensity of alien time pulls at the lithic girl. Oceans, lands, and stars give chase. According to Isidore of Seville, “The sphere of heaven is said to run with a swiftness so great that if the stars did not run against its headlong course to delay it, it would make a ruin of the universe.”1 The winds move swiftly to give earth its nature. We are in oblivion because the universe is also a velocity system, an infinity system, a system for nonhuman time. It can’t even acknowledge us, much less process us.
We breathe a military climatology, it’s the leitmotif of terrorism. Instead of traditional body-to-body combat, we redesign, reassign, resign the air. Designing killer environments for our enemies consolidates the most salient givens of our world: terrorism, design consciousness, and environmental thinking.2 That’s the setting, but how to get the story going? What’s in the wind? Was it speaking, or chasing someone, or on a mission, or asleep? When German soldiers released chlorine gas into a north-by-northwest wind on April 22, 1915, in northern France, which way the wind was blowing meant your ass.
Eighty years later, the US Department of Defense’s essay “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” hypothesizes ways in which weather-modification technologies might give the United States a “weather edge” over adversaries.3 It does so through “fictionalized representations of future scenarios” involving weaponized weather. Imagine, it asks us, the US fighting a powerful drug cartel in South America by staging meteorological acts. By doing so we fictionalize journalism, we “imagine” the truth. Engineering windflow patterns—an air theater, a perfectly orchestrated wind opera—means we can engineer vulnerability. We’ll make them weep and weak. With chemical interventions that would withhold precipitation to induce drought then unleash catastrophic storms, the US military sneaks in disguised as an act of nature. This is a repeatable story. A pilot project conducted in 1966 artificially extended the monsoon season along the Ho Chi Minh trail by releasing silver iodide, a toxic pollutant that stopped people in their tracks. Flash flooding and gales wreaked havoc; the chemical agent made people fall sick.
Since 1993 in Gakona, Alaska, the research station commonly acronymized as HAARP has been practicing ionospheric control.4 In this transitional space, the no-man’s-land between the atmosphere and the magnetosphere, HAARP blasts high-powered radio waves with 180 antennas in a single beam to take down aircraft and set off weather calamities, nature made-to-order for the security domains, as canards and conspiracy talk squall on other frequencies. This world is a testing ground. This world makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that Europe is stealing Iran’s rain, emptying its clouds before the clouds wind-travel to the East—reported widely in the conservative pre
We breathe a military climatology, it’s the leitmotif of terrorism. Instead of traditional body-to-body combat, we redesign, reassign, resign the air. Designing killer environments for our enemies consolidates the most salient givens of our world: terrorism, design consciousness, and environmental thinking.2 That’s the setting, but how to get the story going? What’s in the wind? Was it speaking, or chasing someone, or on a mission, or asleep? When German soldiers released chlorine gas into a north-by-northwest wind on April 22, 1915, in northern France, which way the wind was blowing meant your ass.
Eighty years later, the US Department of Defense’s essay “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” hypothesizes ways in which weather-modification technologies might give the United States a “weather edge” over adversaries.3 It does so through “fictionalized representations of future scenarios” involving weaponized weather. Imagine, it asks us, the US fighting a powerful drug cartel in South America by staging meteorological acts. By doing so we fictionalize journalism, we “imagine” the truth. Engineering windflow patterns—an air theater, a perfectly orchestrated wind opera—means we can engineer vulnerability. We’ll make them weep and weak. With chemical interventions that would withhold precipitation to induce drought then unleash catastrophic storms, the US military sneaks in disguised as an act of nature. This is a repeatable story. A pilot project conducted in 1966 artificially extended the monsoon season along the Ho Chi Minh trail by releasing silver iodide, a toxic pollutant that stopped people in their tracks. Flash flooding and gales wreaked havoc; the chemical agent made people fall sick.
Since 1993 in Gakona, Alaska, the research station commonly acronymized as HAARP has been practicing ionospheric control.4 In this transitional space, the no-man’s-land between the atmosphere and the magnetosphere, HAARP blasts high-powered radio waves with 180 antennas in a single beam to take down aircraft and set off weather calamities, nature made-to-order for the security domains, as canards and conspiracy talk squall on other frequencies. This world is a testing ground. This world makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that Europe is stealing Iran’s rain, emptying its clouds before the clouds wind-travel to the East—reported widely in the conservative pre
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