This paper develops the concept of a poetics of air: a notion borrowed from cultural anthropology that denotes an awareness of the simultaneous material, affective and aesthetic impressions of air and atmosphere. While there is a rich and growing body of work on atmospheric geopolitics and aeromobility, much less attention has been given to the affective and aesthetic dimensions of being in and witnessing air and atmosphere. This paper uses the sensory, affective and aesthetic experience of engaging with an artwork -Dryden Goodwin's large-scale urban installation Breathe -to reflect on the possibility and promise of an airy poetics for expanding disciplinary concerns with air and atmosphere. It is through producing a moving image that is sustained, ventilated and activated by airachieved through the artist's production of a visual sequence and 'active surface' -that Breathe performs an airy poetics: it conveys the porosity of breathing bodies, the texture and materiality of air, and suggests what a collective sensing of atmosphere might look and feel like.

The elements have become the focus of a significant volume of research by geographers and others. Engagements with the elements have been framed in terms of four elemental orientations: matter, molecule, milieu and media. Our aim is to consider what is at stake in efforts to think with, across and beyond these orientations. Avoiding any reduction of the elements to a single ontological or epistemological proposition, we explore possibilities for grasping their implication in the composition and decomposition of worlds. Doing this can be facilitated by thinking about these worlds in relation to three interrelated matters of concern: specificities, exposures and alchemies.

In recent years geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun in order to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect upon some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.

It is a definition of elemental air as more than human, wholly ungraspable, and even monstrous, which enlivens Adey's method of 'affinitive listening' to the elemental. The difference between air, as it has been lately addressed, and the element of air is that the latter precedes and exceeds the specific alchemical compositions of air masses, and is not reducible to the descriptions and metaphors with which we attempt to 'grasp' air and atmosphere. This commentary experiments with the concept of elemental air and, in particular, the method of affinitive listening, with the help of an atmospheric thing. I propose the Montgolfier infrared balloon as a device that sounds and senses air, generating materials and space times that render explicit, and also ungraspable, the atmospheric envelope around Earth.

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