From Cybernetics to Cloud Forests: Media Architectures of Ambient Modernity in the Tropics

In Cloud Forest and Flower Dome, Singapore’s hot and wet tropical climate is transformed into cool montane forest and arid Mediterranean desert through climate-controlling architecture and artificial weather. These two massive glass and steel enclosures offer visitors a journey through “natural” environments in the comfort of cool air. Emerging from a genealogy of atmospheric modification in colonial and postcolonial Singapore, particularly the manipulation of atmospheric humidity, the biomes are an example of the state’s fascination with the art of ambient modernity. This paper conceptualizes modernity as something inhaled, inhabited, calibrated, and calculated through entangled apparatuses of elemental and technological mediation. Elemental media such as air, solar radiation, vapor, glass, and concrete work in concert with technological media such as sensors, computers, and self-learning algorithms to condition interior atmospheres. These media complexes (of glass, moving air, hygrometers, computers, and so on) are what I refer to as “media architectures”—that is, systems of media and mediation that prefigure, process, and manufacture environments and shape the possibilities of life within them. Whether staging the realm of an organism’s possible behavior through walls and floors or through informational feedback loops, designing systems is the premise of the fields of both architecture and cybernetic theory. The biomes’ conditioning of ambient modernity alerts us to how environmental media studies needs to address both fields to better understand itself as a study of control (and controlled) systems. This paper examines how these media architectures emerge out of distinct intersections in the history of (post)colonial architecture, cybernetic theory, and state capitalism. As contributors to the problem of waste heat, the biomes furthermore reveal how the making of ambient modernity is dependent upon entrenched histories of thermal inequality— networks of migrant labor with roots in nineteenth- and twentieth-century extractive colonial industries.