Racial Atmospherics

What happens when we understand air as racial matter? This paper takes up this question by tracking the political, architectural, and artistic genealogies of Cold War phytotrons, or computer-controlled climatic laboratories. Arguing that the 1960s historical moment and the war in Vietnam initiated new paradigms for thinking together an imperial interest in pneumatics (engineered air) with racialized processes of biopolitical management, this paper moves through two case studies—the Climatron, an air-conditioned greenhouse built in 1960 St. Louis, and contemporary Chinese American artist Carl Cheng’s sculptural work—to argue that pneumatic forms offer crucial and underexamined insights into Asian American racial form. If the Climatron’s vision of climatic control both reflected and reinforced the US’s pneumatic imperialism across Asia and the Pacific, Cheng’s work stages a contention with how the racialized, gendered, and militarized logics of economy, extraction, and reproduction are naturalized by phytotronic logics in excess of the figure of the human.