We live in a remarkable geological moment in history, the anthropogenic era, when spontaneously over the course of millions of years, and increasingly in recent centuries, humans are becoming, intermittently yet inevitably, a geological force that changes the face of our planet. – Vladimir Vernadsky 

Moving Atmospheres, the tenth Garage Atrium Commission curated by Iaroslav Volovod, is a partially mirrored sphere suspended in the air, propelling us towards an Aerocene epoch. We call towards this new era with Aerocene. For more than a decade we have been imagining a world free from the carbon, extractivism, capitalism and patriarchy that fuels some forms of life, a new way of being with the atmosphere and emissions-free travel, free from solar panels, lithium, helium, hydrogen and fossil fuels. This new era stands in stark contrast to the lingering eco-traumas of the Anthropocene, the current geological age in which some human capitalistic activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

This unique artwork, conceived of for Garage, takes us a step closer toward this new era, integrating for the first time a material that posits the sculpture as a working prototype for a balloon that could float around the world, fueled only by the air we breathe and the heat of the sun. The use of ETFE, an extremely durable translucent polymer, means the artwork performs a crucial next step in the development of aerosolar flights.

The installation Moving Atmospheres is a modeled version of a larger structure, also made of ETFE, proven to sustain long-distance flights, while floating at altitudes between 20 and 40 km. The design of this sculpture builds on scientific experiments begun by the French Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), where Tomás Saraceno was artist-in-residence throughout 2012. Beginning in the late 1970s CNES began to launch Infrared radiation balloons (montgolfière infrarouge, or MIR) into the upper levels of the atmosphere. These structures are made of two different lightweight materials: transparent and mirror foils, through which the latter reflects part of the sun’s radiation preventing the air envelopes from overheating. At night, the transparent section tempers the temperature inside the envelope, absorbing infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface: the solar heat that the planet accumulated during the day.

The project for Garage resonates with the most daring concepts of the Russian avant-garde, of which suggested that people and buildings—and even entire cities—should become airborne. Yet, while the visionary ideas of the Russian cosmists foreshadowed a speedy relocation to new extraterrestrial habitats, we propose an alternative that enables us to attune to the air, its movements and the role we each play as co-creators of the atmosphere. Leading cosmist Nikolai Fedorov saw the museum as fundamentally contradicting the idea of progress, and sought to unite the space of life with the space of the museum.