In the Time of Clouds is an installation that utilizes the networked “cloud” to explore our collective sensorial relationship to the sky. Responding to a February 2019 Nature Geoscience article that speculates about a possible future without clouds, the project attempts to archive cloud forms and document their influence on our collective imagination before they disappear from our atmosphere due to rising carbon dioxide concentrations. Utilizing both social media discourse about clouds and live video streams from public observatory cameras, the project amalgamates linguistic and visual data, mining this data to create an atmospheric triptych of poetry, ice cream, and ceramics.
The installation is composed of three intertwined parts. Part I (The Observatories) is a series of videos showing a composite of poems and live streams from networked observatory webcams. The videos provide a simultaneous view of the sky from different points around the earth. Overlaid texts tick horizontally, displaying haiku poems algorithmically generated from social media discourse about the taste of clouds. The computer program creates an essentially infinite number of poem permutations. In addition to generating poems, the program also detects and captures cloud forms from the live streams, creating an archive of line drawings that are cataloged and printed according to location, date, and time.
These printed line drawings lay the foundation for Part II (Terracotta Clouds), a collection of handbuilt dessert wares that are based on unique cloud forms from the archive. These terracotta wares are utilized in the exhibition as objects for consuming sweets (ice cream). However, they also serve as cautionary objects, attempting to document the clouds using earthenware—connecting an artistic medium from prehistoric times to a speculative future. The wares are intended to be eventually buried in the ground, becoming archaeological artifacts for future civilizations—human or alien—once our time on this earth has passed.
In Part III (Cloud Ice Cream), the terracotta wares are used to serve an ice cream whose flavor profile is derived from social media discourse speculating about the taste of clouds, a “cloud ice cream.” Using over 10 years of scraped language data drawn from the same data set used to create the poems, the piece explores our collective imagination about the taste of these ephemeral formations, parsing this data and materializing it in the cloud-like form of ice cream—a food that is made more sensorially “fluffy” through high levels of air injection. The ice cream was developed in collaboration with Dr. Dennis D’Amico, associate professor of dairy foods at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Animal Science, and created at the UConn Dairy Creamery.
