“Laboratory in a Dirty Sky”: Aerial Media, Art, and Air Pollution in Project Da Vinci (1974–1979)

Abstract

This article develops the idea of aerial media as a way of grasping the conceptual and empirical intersection of geographies of air pollution, artistic experiment, and media. To do so it revisits Project Da Vinci (1974–1979), a series of balloon flights devised by artist and aeronaut Vera H. Simons that combined scientific research into sulfate pollution in the United States, experiments with aerial art, and forms of public engagement. Drawing on original archival research, the article begins by foregrounding Simons’s pivotal role in Project Da Vinci as part of her wider contribution to cultures of aerial experimentation in the United States and beyond. Focusing on how the project sought to understand the dynamic geographies of sulfate pollution plumes, the article then examines how this aim became articulated through a more ambitious effort to generate public engagement with air quality in the United States. Taken together, Da Vinci’s flights enacted a distinctive form of aerial media that combined the drift of airborne craft with moving air, artistic interventions within the air, and public engagement from the air. The category of aerial media, the article argues, therefore encompasses more than the use of airborne devices for the distribution of traditional media forms or the production of views from above: It also involves specific ways of moving that make air explicit as a medium of concern.