Page - 8 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

8 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Rainer Kazig, Damien Masson, Rachel Thomas | Atmospheres and Mobility considers issues of physical displacement as well as the required motor, sensory and cognitive abilities to perform such an activity. Taking into account these dimensions opens the question of the emotional states and of the modes of attention to the environment, and how these are affected by mobile practices. Atmosphere refers to a qualified space-time (Thibaud 2004), and has an effective power on motion and perception. Indeed, feeling and moving are co-consti- tutive, and motion is fundamental to feeling and perception, as our bodies sense differences (Gibson 1986, Straus 1992), and, reversely, motion could not happen without sensing. As they qualify the sensory background to any material and social situation, atmospheres contribute to putting individuals on the move – simply consider the moving effect of music on some of the listener’s muscles, on the one hand, and the embodied intensity carried out through mobilized bodies dancing collectively in festive atmospheres, on the other hand. Another, and more sub- tle example, is the atmospheric power of flows of people, that gives a corporeal order to space, which has to do with rhythm and ‘obvious quasi-choreography’, with which bodies might – or not – attune to use as a resource to act (Goffman 1963, Ryave and Schenken 1975, Bordreuil 2004). Therefore, the subjectivity, corporeity, and positionality of these bodies all contribute to question their (un)ability to such an attunement. Atmospheres are therefore neither carried out through a simple signal, nor experienced using a single sense. Atmospheres are processual, they go along space and time, are characterized by lability, modulation, and relate to – socia- lized, culturalized, racialized, gendered, etc. – bodily presence. Any atmosphere results from an arrangement between the material, sensorial and social elements that constantly compose, recompose, modulate, or even transform themselves brutally. And mobility – in all its forms and at its different scales – shapes experiences, which are constantly modulated through affects, moods and to the sensory resources of the environment. Motion, and by extension, mobility is therefore a sine qua non condition of the atmosphere. Then, taking the environment and the very modes of attention and of relationship to it as a starting point makes the detour by the notion of atmosphere, nonetheless heuristic, but also useful. Indeed, the focus on the sensitive qualities of the environments in which individuals are immersed helps to widen the potential registers of understanding mobility. Moreover, this approach goes beyond an understanding of the environment as a (sensory) container of mobile activities as it necessarily stresses the interplay between sensory configurations and practices. To illustrate, it could be asked: how does the very nature of a pavement, the blinding effect of the morning sun, the void but still reverberant sonic quality of an empty underground station at night, and so on, contribute to the way one might move and experience space and place? Reversely, how does this perceiving and moving act continually reshape the sensory environment? And how does the sensory power of situated bodies and the multiple ways they act contribute to alter a situation? And how then, for example, do moving bodies radiate and affect their environment, might this one be composed and re-composed at the nexus of sensory, human and built dimensions? Therefore, the relation- ship enacted while moving might be considered as going back and forth between humans and non-human agents forging a constantly renewed environment and its atmospheric-scape. Bridging Atmospheres & Mobility: Three Challenges By exploring the overlap between atmospheres and mobility, this special issue of ‘Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal (›mcsj›)’ asks how atmosphere(s) can contribute to research on mobility, and