Week 03: Weather Balloons, Conspiracy, and the Air Between Us

Reflections on Figures in Air

Okay so I'll be real - this Micah Silver text is dense as hell, but once I started actually engaging with it instead of just skimming, some parts really clicked with my weather balloon research.

Three quotes that stuck with me:

1. "Audio are always in a productive and ephemeral reciprocity with a social architecture inhabiting it, even if we are alone."

   This got me thinking about how weather balloons exist in this weird liminal space - they're collecting data in the atmosphere, literally in the air, but they also generate all this social/cultural noise around surveillance and conspiracy. Like, the balloon itself is just doing its thing, but the "social architecture" we build around it (UFO theories, government surveillance paranoia) is just as real as the actual object.

2. "We can consider that it may be a powerful tool to understand this representation as inherently ancestral and as linked more broadly to the current status of subjectivity's insight into the absolute."

   Weather balloons have this whole ancestral quality - they've been around since the 1700s but we still don't fully trust what they represent. Are they just measuring temperature and pressure? Or are they watching us? That gap between what they actually do and what we believe they do is where all the interesting stuff happens.

3. "Audio affords an uncomfortably intimate encounter with representation, as our subjective acoustic memory, our sense of place, our personal memories, our ways of thinking, feeling, and being, spark together forming so quickly it's nearly impossible to parse the resulting composites."

   Even though Silver is talking about audio here, this feels relevant to how weather balloons function in our cultural imagination. They're these composite objects - part science instrument, part surveillance tool, part alien spacecraft, part government lie. We can't quite separate all the layers.

How This Impacts My Approach

Reading this made me realize my satirical guide could play with this idea of "social architecture" - like, what if the guide seems super straightforward and educational at first (here's how to track a weather balloon, here's what the data means) but slowly reveals all the paranoid infrastructure we've built around these objects?

The whole section about disco sound systems creating "temporary social architectures" where different behaviors become possible is weirdly relevant. Weather balloons create their own kind of social space - one where regular people suddenly become amateur investigators, where seeing a white dot in the sky turns your neighbor into a conspiracy theorist.

Form: Video/Audio Guide Inspirations

The Adult Swim/alantutorial vibe feels perfect for this because they nail that slow descent from "helpful tutorial" into something more unsettling.

Why this works for weather balloons:

• Conspiracy theories love the aesthetic of the explainer video - all those YouTube videos with dramatic music and red circles pointing at blurry photos

• Weather balloon tracking is actually a real hobby, so I can start with genuine instructional content

• The slippage between "here's how to identify a weather balloon" and "here's how to REALLY know what you're seeing" writes itself

I'm thinking the guide could include:

• Actual weather balloon tracking techniques (legit)

• Gradual introduction of "alternative interpretations"

• Maybe field recordings of radio frequencies weather balloons use

• Interviews with "experts" who may or may not be reliable

• Visual glitches/degradation as the "truth" gets murkie

Additional Research Findings

Found some interesting stuff this week:

• Project Mogul (1947) - literally the weather balloon that caused the Roswell UFO incident. The government said "it's just a weather balloon" and everyone went "EXACTLY WHAT THEY'D SAY IF IT WASN'T." Wild how weather balloons became the default cover story, which made them even more suspicious. [Source: McAndrew, James. "The Roswell Report: Case Closed." U.S. Air Force, 1997. https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104590/roswell-report/]
  

• The Chinese Balloon Incident (Feb 2023) - this one's recent and perfect. A literal weather balloon became an international incident. Shows how these objects still occupy this contested space between science and surveillance. [Source: Cooper, Helene, et al. "Chinese Spy Balloon Flew Over Secret Nuclear Weapons Sites." New York Times, Feb 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/15/us/politics/chinese-spy-balloon-nuclear-sites.html]
  

• Amateur balloon tracking communities - there are whole forums of people tracking high-altitude balloons, sharing coordinates, debating what's government vs civilian vs educational. The genuine enthusiasm mixed with low-key paranoia is fascinating. [Check out: SondeHub amateur radiosonde tracking network - https://sondehub.org/]
  

• Adult Swim's "Unedited Footage of a Bear" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8) - This one's a masterclass in the form I'm going for. Starts as a straightforward nature documentary, then shifts into this disturbing pharmaceutical ad parody, then completely dissolves into psychological horror. The way it uses the "authoritative guide" format but slowly corrupts it is exactly what I want to do with weather balloon tracking. The trust you place in documentary-style footage gets weaponized against you.
  

• alantutorial series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5adN74aBxZk) - These tutorial videos are genuinely unsettling because they maintain the instructional format even as everything falls apart. The creator is supposedly teaching you how to do something, but it becomes clear something else is going on. For weather balloons, I could use this energy - like, I'm teaching you balloon identification techniques, but maybe I'm also slowly revealing that I've been tracked, followed, or that the balloons are tracking back. The format holds even when the content gets weird.
  

• Adult Swim's "Off The Air 'Holes'" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L1SlmeN2oM) - This one's more of a reference for the editing style and how to structure loosely connected segments around a theme. The episode has this general motif of "holes" but the clips are all pretty unrelated to each other - it's more about the vibe and the surreal juxtapositions. What's interesting is it actually starts with footage from Alan Tutorial (the same creator as the tutorial series I mentioned) before moving into increasingly abstract and trippy visual interpretations of holes - literal holes, metaphorical voids, negative space, etc. For my weather balloon guide, I'm thinking about that kind of structure - starting with something concrete and tutorial-like, then gradually shifting into more abstract territory. The way "Off The Air" uses quick cuts and unexpected transitions between different types of footage could work really well for moving between "legitimate" balloon tracking and weirder conspiracy theory stuff.
  

• Sasha Engelmann's "Sensing Art Atmosphere" (https://www-taylorfrancis-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/books/mono/10.4324/9780429270437/sensing-art-atmosphere-sasha-engelmann) - This book connects directly to weather balloon work since Engelmann actually does open-source weather satellite image reception and thinks about the atmosphere as both physical and cultural space. Her work on "aerocene" practices and DIY atmospheric sensing feels relevant because weather balloon tracking is literally about sensing the atmosphere - but it's also about sensing through all the cultural baggage we've attached to these objects. The atmosphere isn't neutral; it's loaded with surveillance anxieties, climate crisis, military testing, etc.
  

• Prophecy Sun's "Objects Wrapped in Dreams Wrapped in Objects" - This piece gets at something really interesting about how objects accumulate meaning through our projections onto them. Weather balloons are literally objects wrapped in dreams (UFO fantasies, surveillance paranoia, scientific optimism) wrapped back in the object itself. Sun writes about how we can't separate the material thing from all the psychic/cultural stuff we've layered onto it. For weather balloons, this feels spot-on - is there even a "real" weather balloon underneath all our anxieties about it, or has it become inseparable from those projections?
  

• Tomás Saraceno's Museo Aero Solar (https://studiotomassaraceno.org/museo-aero-solar-for-an-aerocene-era/) - Saraceno's work with DIY solar balloons and "aerocene" practices offers this utopian counter-narrative to weather balloon paranoia. He's interested in collaborative, open-source balloon projects that reimagine our relationship to the atmosphere as shared commons rather than militarized/surveilled space. The tension between his hopeful vision of community balloon-building and the surveillance-state reality of weather balloons is pretty stark. Could be interesting to play with both angles - the paranoid tracking guide vs. the utopian DIY balloon community.

Next Steps

Working on a rough script that moves from straightforward DIY tracking guide into something weirder. Thinking about what the "air" means here - both literally (where balloons exist) and metaphorically (the atmosphere of suspicion/wonder they create).

Also considering whether to include actual field recordings or if keeping it purely visual/scripted is stronger. Silver's whole thing about audio creating social architecture makes me think sound could be important here.

Anyway, that's where I'm at. The reading definitely pushed me to think about weather balloons as more than just objects - they're these nodes that generate whole networks of belief, doubt, science, and paranoia.