1. One day, in August 2019 at 2pm, the sky in São Paulo turned dark and reddish. It felt apocalyptic as if the sky was the bearer of bad news. And it was. It was smoke from criminal activity from 1000km away. The Brazilian agribusiness was burning Pantanal – one of the last and most important ecosystems and environmental reserves in the world – in order to be able to plant more soybeans and raise cattle. One doesn’t usually consider the sky as the immediate medium for ground activities, but, since the sky reveals the biochemistry of the atmosphere, perhaps we should.

2. A planetary surface is formed by several layers. Complex flows, emergent dynamics and cascading effects that happen at macro and micro scales. That is, it is a surface made of particles and patterns. Particles are basic units of matter and/or energy. From subatomic particles, such as electrons, to those large enough to be seen, such as dust floating in sunlight. Patterns are particular arrangements with frequent or widespread incidence in space or time.

3. Lines of territories.
Lines of violence.
Lines of flight.
Lines that inform us of our fate.
Life lines.
Lines that measure.
Lines of code.

4. The chemistry composition of the sky is a language of patterns made by particles in time. As physicist and climate engineer David Keith notes in his book “A case for climate engineering” (MIT Press, 2013): “Carbon casts a long shadow onto the future: a thousand years after we stop pumping carbon into the air the warming will still be about half as large as it was on the day we stopped”. Time is of essence. The sky we have now, with high carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, we inherited from decades of fossil fuel industry monopoly. And to act now means both to avoid passing this risk to future generations and limiting the harm that past generations have imposed in the present. Therefore, we need short and long term solutions. The best way to break away with a monopoly is with a complex and dynamic toolkit. Short and long term solutions will look like a mix of technical, economical and social changes such as: socially consuming less and more efficiently; decarbonizing the economy (both by desinvesting in the fossil fuel industry and by removing the carbon that is already in the atmosphere with carbon capture and storage technologies); creating a more robust power grid with more investment in low emission energy (solar, wind, nuclear); diminishing greenhouse effects with solar geoengineering tactics; protecting and providing safety nets for those in areas of climate risk, etc.

5. A perspectival revision: if the sky is an extension to ground activities, it is always being made and remade. That is, it is always artificial (not as in false, but as in a synthetic entity; always in conjunction with the human, in its chemical composition, spiritual projections, astronomical observations).

6. What we call crisis and risk when referring to the climate emergency is so due to the current rate of change of temperatures, precipitation and atmospheric composition patterns. These patterns are becoming more erratic, affecting for example hydrocycles. However this does not mean that the current climate is “some magic optimum for life” (as David Keith puts it). Maybe there are better climates out there. What we should aim for is to step out of crisis mode, not climate manipulation.

7. I have been writing on the necessity of having a new universal index, separated from the current colonial, western and patriarchal frameworks and, instead, projected as a form of constant multiplicity. This new universal index would not be something that every person on the planet is supposed to agree on. A universal index is not about total and complete agreement. It is about forging constant and multiple possibilities. It is meant as universal because it would give the conditions for every person on the planet to exist fully with and within its own cultural, social and local contexts without forfeiting its participation in the planetary.

8. Another perspectival revision: the climate crisis requires new models of collectivity at scale that step beyond the geopolitics of nation-state sovereignty. However, that also means finding new symbols/indexes for such a collectivity outside of the ones used by nation-states.

9. Every human culture, when it looks at the sky, is engaging in a process of world-making. One can find in many books, films, stories the sky as an awe inducing entity. Its starry nights are inspirational. Its ethereality is mysterious at the same time that its solidity is protective. We mix narratives and information in order to give sense to events, such as, for example, weather occurrences. At the same time, we all share the same sky, the same atmosphere. Atmospheric events are interdependent and cannot be looked at disconnected. They are multiple and at the same time act as a universal condition. Could the sky be a universal index?

10. CELESTE brief: a planet which orients itself through its sky and atmospheric conditions, instead of through its territories and material resources. It decentralizes the human scale by focusing on atmospheric particles and cosmic phenomena. How do sky patterns inform us about the current state of the world? How observation techniques are instruments of narrative speculation and control? How to create narratives based on the relationship between the macro and the micro scale? What is the story particles and patterns are telling us? We build from that.

11. Not to look at the sky, to look with the sky.

12. “ Studying the physical world requires confronting the social world.”, astrophysicist and activist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein writes  in her book “ The Disordered Cosmos” (PublicAffairs, 2021) on how science relies on and is used by racist, universalist and colonial parameters and methodologies, making it extremely hard, if not impossible, to promote different world views. One of the main challenges in dealing with the climate crisis is its feature of being at the same time global and local. It is a planetary crisis with localized consequences. This challenge requires a new way of thinking about the planetary scale and how to mobilize collectivity without falling back into colonial perspectives of a universal that only accounts for the Western civilization. How decentralization from this colonial perspective and new technical solutions can add to the topic and engage new power dynamics? Local solutions can become global geopolitical problems through this inversion of power dynamics offered by new technologies (such as solar geoengineering and nuclear energy) and new forms of territorial governance (demarcation of indigenous territories which have been proven to be the ones with no degradation in the last few decades).

13. Indexed metrics become dynamic and dimensional tools of sharing information in time. They perform as a kind of storytelling, establishing narratives. A progressive universal would have to be built bottom-up, multidimensional, scalable and indexed in temporal and spatial recursivity processes, guaranteeing its actualization and networked quality. This networked quality of indexing a universal is perhaps one of the areas that require the most attention, for it is where the complex effects and consequential contacts with reality will appear and how, slowly, it will be possible to engineer a counter-hegemony. It is because one single index does not have enough resolution to convey a clear picture that indexes can be defined as various pieces of information that have to be woven together into a more complex narrative.

14.  A cosmic certainty: In order to see you need the right wavelength.

15. There is no escaping the inflexible fate, but we are not looking for eternal life. Instead, we look for the potential of life. For the conditions that make life possible.

Luiza Crosman

* These notes were written in between the research and production of the video Átropos Sky, during my residency at MediaLab/MATADERO, Madrid, May 2022 and the exhibition CELESTE, at Gomide&co, São Paulo, August 2022.