FABRICATING AIR: CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

Abstract

Based on a review of a set of advertising posters of Lennox Furnace Company, interwoven with borrowed and original ideas, this essay delves into a series of paradoxes embedded in modern discourses. Supported by the warnings about the repercussions of an ideology based on the technique carried out by Herbert George Wells, Max Frisch,
and Hannah Arendt, it presents a set of strategies to advertise air conditioning: a technological invention that, due to its rapid and massive assimilation, can be understood as a reflection of modernization and symbol of modernity. The objective is to tie a knot between abstract conceptual structures and concrete graphic and discursive constructions that permeated the collective subconscious during the 20th century to propose a critique of the modern illusion that progress is linear and unlimited and that things must always be better, bigger, and newer.