What does a taxonomy of air look like? What are the conventions of

packaging an ephemeral material? How can air from New York City be an expensive commodity, while fresh air from Aurora, Colorado is simply free? Air has varied qualities that when objectified, lead to a multitude of imagined connotations, forms, expressions and price points.

Hot Air, is a catalogue of commoditized air. Air is for sale, air is used to sell, and air is on sale. Packaged Air is at once a reflection of our culture and an artifact of time, oscillating between the abstract and the absurd, capturing moments, sealing up feelings, canning full cities. While packaged air, such as compressed air, can be utilitarian in it’s function, air can also be packaged as an advertisement to sell a feeling, or a shoe.

Hot Air is a chronology of this morphology

Hot Air is a marketplace for air’s multiplicities

Hot Air is a repository of air rights.

Hot Air, All Your Air Needs

In Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, he writes, “The more we fight phenomenological sincerity with our reason, the more glued we figure out we are, which is what it feels like to live in risk society: a society in which growing scientific awareness of risk (from toxic chemicals, for instance) changes the nature of democracy itself.”1 While many containers of air refer to the nostalgia of place, commercialism, fear of our ecological conditions, and hype culture, they are rooted in a society that is aware of the tangibility of memory. The tools for objectifying this hyperobject tries to empower mankind, allowing them to embody a “creator, sculpture, or architect of the social organism.”2 Through the objects collected here, in a commercialist society, the most empowering position is that of the