clouds nest like cysts on the soft tissues of their hosting milieu
2022multimedia-installation with videos (7‘, 3.5‘, 3.5‘), sculptures in silicone, fabric and plexiglas, performance and sound.
Your mine-eyes mirror a milieu: a dark site on remote control. A blob of ether, a cloud of confusion, yellow dust sets onto a murky swamp. The granular, hissing, forms a riverbed to flush out data mines’ pixel. Hot spots in a cool place: the datasphere is alive with corporate chunks of imperial extraction. “Dig that bit there, coin!” And in that necrotic foggy zero-energy state, you and I have never been so close.
When to toss the (dry) dust, that once was your thoughts, that turns to swamp that turns to gas? This work is conceptualized as a milieu that hosts human as well as non-human actors, and lands in three main sites: a wormhole-like bunker system, an mining site and a datacenter. The project questions the metaphor of the cloud as a metaphor for the (seemingly) immateriality of the digital, with working through the infrastructures – where the cloud actually touches the ground (as datacenter, render hall, etc.). It dwells around the mystification of notions like the (remote) dark site, the Réduit of Switzerland as a vast bunker-storage space and engages with a datacenter’s geopolitical circumstances that are fueled by thermoculutres and wealth-distribution-inequalities. The performances deal with the relationship we have towards our devices around notions of zero-energy-state, smooth-brain-state and intimacy. In this work I propose to think through the metaphor of the cloud 2.0 as an entangled, yet gaseous being that could unbind thinking from its sharp mind/black-white/computational thought, shifting towards a more entangled, complex thought-world making.
Presented at Centrale Fies, Dro (IT), as part of „tutt(le) rotte - all (the) ways: unfixed“ AEROPONIC ACTS, Dutch Art Institute, July 2022.
With the participation of Alexandra Martens Serrano, Emmeli Person, Izaro Ieregi, Maud Gyssels and Mirjam Steffen. Sound: Maud Gyssels.
