Ventilating

Yandong Li

Ventilating can be considered a fundamental cultural technique both for labs and beyond. Ventilation moves the indoor air. As a result, this process refreshes the air, removes odors, hazardous gas, and particles, reduces humidity, cools the temperature, and prevents disease from occurring and spreading. Usually, this process is achieved through the passive design of windows. Other times, ventilation is achieved through an active design approach—a mechanically engineered fume hood, grille, register, and diffuser (GRD). In architectural engineering, ventilation is an inseparable part of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). Architectural historians Reyner Banham and Daniel barber point out that modern architecture depends greatly on the engineering of HVAC systems, and they further draw our attention from architectural engineering to the larger picture of climate control, and direct the research of ventilation to the realm of the social meaning of management and lifestyle.1

The windows, vents, and pipes alone, however, do not independently operate the ventilation process. Oftentimes, machines require humans to work alongside them. Even in a “smart” automatic system that employs digital computation monitoring the indoor and outdoor environment, an experienced technician often operates the process. Thus, it is necessary to consider the body techniques in this process, and moving from “ventilation” to “ventilating” allows us to see not only the technological objects, but the politics and culture in laboratories including biological and chemical experiments, medical quarantine, and agricultural practices.

As a technical process, ventilating is imbricated with other lab practices. For example, ventilating is inseparable from “collecting” (see “collecting” in The Lab Book). In a chemistry laboratory, for instance, technicians store chemicals in appropriate cabinets—volatile liquids must be stored in shades and freezers, and air-sensitive materials must be sealed and stored away from vents.2 Jussi Parikka points out that the actions of collecting and classifying are simultaneously questions of “remains”—the inside, outside and threshold of an archive. Thus, in a ventilating process, it is crucial to think what are the “remains” kept outside the lab and the ventilation system, and where and when are the “remains” can be engaged with the lab practices.3

A greenhouse embodies many features of a laboratory. It is a laboratory in the sense of how Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka describe the lab as “a way of understanding recurring forms of power and experimentality, not just as a part of the history of science and as a series of tropes that appear in contemporary discourses about labs in the arts, humanities, and culture at large.”4 In other words, the greenhouse is a laboratory for agricultural practices and a technological environment that alters the farming land into a controlled environment. Walter Benjamin implies that arcades changed the shopping experience of the Parisians in the 19th century. Without worrying about the weather, Parisians enjoy a shopping experience brought by glass and iron. Similarly, the introduction of greenhouse farming not only challenges the lifestyle of a farmer, but the Chinese cultural idiom that farmers “live at the mercy of the sky.” Ventilating, as a key cultural technique in greenhouse farming, shows the cultures and politics within our ecocultural worlds.

In contemporary China, the mechanization and smartification of greenhouse farming is being promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and digital corporations such as Alibaba. Farmers are encouraged to use ventilation equipment including exhaust fans, graphene,5 metal curtains6 and censors and data analysis tools.7 These new technologies, however, are often costly, and it is inconceivable that they are universalized among farmers without governmental subsidies. At the same time, farmers have pointed out that technologies such as exhaust fans and metal curtains may not suit the local situation,8 which can lead to the abandonment of facilities. As an alternative, farmers turn to techniques that do not require the most cutting-edge ventilation technology. For instance, the timing of opening and closing the window is a technique that is performed by an experienced farmer who can observe and react to the internal and external weather on a daily base. A greenhouse needs ventilation to avoid overheating. Thus, this technique concerns everyday sunrise and sunset, internal and external temperature, weather, and geographical location. For example, in northwest China, a greenhouse is often designed facing the south, and during springtime, farmers usually open the greenhouse window at nine am and close it at five pm; the ritual is set according to the sun rising and setting and seasonal wind. These “low-tech” designs and techniques, compared to the engineered HVAC system, specify an alternative in energy efficiency.

Moreover, certain plants require air circulation to complete pollination. It is, however, difficult to achieve desired air circulation in a greenhouse setting. As a consequence, pollination is often fulfilled by domesticated bumblebees. Through decades of greenhouse farming practice, bumblebees are biologically designed to adapt to the warm and humid greenhouse environment, and they are able to efficiently work long hours.9 Thus, the controlled ventilating process, in other words—the absence of ventilating—further reveals a history of relations between farmers and nonhumans. At large, ventilating, as a cultural technique, is valuable in connecting scientific experiments and knowledge production among the grassroots.

Yandong Li (he/him) is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington’s Department of Cinema and Media Studies, as well as the Science, Technology, Society Studies graduate certificate program.