AIR CONDITIONING

Object Lessons is a series of short beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed Yet by manipulating the air around us it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical mental and emotional experience From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable self contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non issue in some people s daily lives thermoception or the sensory perception of temperature is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing social control and labor management Yet air conditioning isn t for everybody its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable climate controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable Hsuan Hsu s Air Conditioning explores questions about culture ethics ecology and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic