Introducing Wind Humanities: A Q&A with Media+Environment’s Wind as Model, Media, and Experience Guest Editors
Wind as Model, Media, and Experience is a new Stream, or special collection, of articles in UC Press’s open-access journal Media+Environment. Drawing together work from environmental humanities, media studies, and artistic practice, this groundbreaking collection guest edited by Maximilian Hepach, Ryan Bishop, J.R. Carpenter, Jussi Parikka, and Birgit Schneider introduces Wind Humanities and explores how wind shapes experience, reasoning, and artistic and knowledge production.
UC Press: You note the long and ongoing environmental turn in humanities, a turn you built upon with your work at the Weather Reports research project at the University of Southampton and University of Potsdam. What is it about wind that makes it the next logical extension of this environmental turn?
Wind, as an element, presents unique challenges to the long environmental turn and to humanistic inquiry more broadly. It questions the very possibility of securing it as a single ‘object’ to be studied, as one element among many. Hence the Stream more closely focuses on what wind does as opposed to what it is. Given the perceptual and conceptual challenges it presents–Can wind itself be perceived or defined?--it, unsurprisingly, holds specific historical, cultural, scientific, technological, and artistic appeal, which the Stream explores. As a complex, dynamic system, wind challenged physics and scientific modelling capabilities while also presenting human imagination with the very embodiment of change and ephemera in spite of its apparent insubstantiality. As both an effect and agent of climate change, its apparent capriciousness means wind carries different messages than it might have done in the past. Exploring wind is hence a possibility of articulating what changes with climate change. Our project had a capacious remit, as the collection’s subtitle details, because wind’s role within human and environmental history demands such.
UC Press: Wind as Model, Media, and Experience makes a wide-ranging and varied, “rich and evolving landscape of inquiry around wind.” Tell us about some of the articles in the stream.
The contributions to the stream were selected to represent a wide range of geographical and interdisciplinary perspectives; are all singularly special, and we would be reluctant to single out any of the contributions from the collection. That said, one rationale for wanting it to appear in Media+Environment was to take advantage of the artistic opportunities afforded by a multimodal, web-based journal. The pieces included in the collection that most leverage these capacities are “Lines of Flight,” a sequence of web-based digital poems by Richard A. Carter and “An Island of Sound: A Libretto,” an article by J.R. Carpenter and Jules Rawlinson written into the structure of the libretto they devised for the live performance of a web-based digital poem. While these two pieces exemplify practice-based wind research, all of the pieces in the stream include or discuss artistic material, ranging from myths, to poems, to audio and video recordings, to drawings, to paintings, to photography, to art installations, and to scientific visualisations.
UC Press: What’s next for Wind Humanities?
Future directions for humanities research into wind emerged as we were editing the Stream. Unsurprisingly, how wind was conceived of by each contributor bore the trace of their own aeolian geographies. Wind encounters took place in the archive, in research institutes, in galleries, in digital and analogue artworks, in ‘the field’ on the ground, water, and in the air. They were informed be each contributor’s own biography. In collating these encounters, we became aware of winds that might be missing, especially climate changed winds. In the more familiar and well reported on geography of the United States alone, late 2024 and early 2025 saw devastating winds hit both Florida (Hurricane Helene and Milton) and California (Southern California wildfires). News reports following the former highlighted “How Back-to-Back Hurricanes Harm Mental Health”, trapping people in a “cycle of anxiety and trauma.” Following the latter on social media and TikTok in particular, videos of emergency preparations and encroaching fire were accompanied by the haunting howl of the Santa Ana winds, even inside apartment building hallways. Future work in the Wind Humanities might help articulate such changes in wind and how they are implicated in a wider socio-material context and future energy infrastructures. Future work might draw greater attention towards minoritised geographies and their winds.
The entire Stream offers a metonym for where some intriguing directions of inquiry and study could potentially go but is only a small step in that regard. If wind is best perceived acting on the world through proxies (as in paintings of rustling trees or clothes or sweeping clouds or in our embodied haptic relationship with it), and if wind is both indicative of change, whether in terms of hope or destruction, then Wind Humanities might offer interdisciplinary inquiry the number of potential directions one would expect to find in and from inquiries into such a complex, dynamic system.
UC Press: Thanks so much! We look forward to seeing what the future holds for this fascinating new field of environmental humanities and media studies research.
Media+Environment is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research. The journal seeks to foster dialogue within a fast-growing global community of researchers and creators working to understand and address the myriad ways that media and environments affect, inhabit, and constitute one another. Founded on the premise that media and environment is a crucial conjunction for our time, the journal thus encourages both traditional and multimodal forms of scholarship.
Media+Environment is published by the University of California Press, and founded in partnership with the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Additional support is provided by the Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, University of California, Santa Barbara; University of Vermont’s EcoCultureLab; UC Santa Barbara’s Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab; University of Southampton; Monash University’s Media and Environment Research Program; The Institute of Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS) supported by the German Research Foundation; and Princeton University’s Blue Lab.