Produced by the research group, Size Matters, the Wind Tunnel Bulletin No. 1 offers a modern poetics of wind. Editors Haseeb Ahmed, Florian Dombois, Kaspar König, Mirjam Steiner, Sarine Waltenspül, and Reinhard Wendeler contribute theoretical writings and technical sketches along with transdisciplinary materials that include Masanao Abe’s cloud studies from the 1930’s along with archival photographs of the midcentury Gottingen wind tunnel. And in dealing with problematics of science and technical domination, the editors give due homage to the mythic wind-harnesser, Odysseus: the sailor thrown to the mercy of the winds and who, subject to this turbulent principle, also becomes the subject of a great epic poem. 

Wind tunnels were first designed and implemented in aerodynamic experiments around 1900. This new invention was representative of an industrial prowess that could instrumentalize even this most elusive and almighty of the elements. As the periodical explores, modern impulses at nature-domination were related to the artistic activities of the European avant-garde, Italian Futurism particularly, which welcomed the merger of science and art in a bombastic aesthetics of machismo and speed. 

This 21st century group of artists and theorists from Switzerland, reinterprets the wind tunnel around a criterion of the “quiet and slow”. Calling their own tunnel “The Temple of Winds”, they work to restore wonder in the element and effect a re-mythologization of wind through art and science.