This past week, I refined aspects of the narrative & the user journey. I almost feel kind of breathless trying to synthesize the readings I’ve done (thanks too Anna Greenspan and Afroditi Psarra), mainly Pre-history of the Cloud, Network Culture, Sparks to Signals, Atmospheres of Communication, and in the process of reading Earth Sound Earth Signal. I would like to later this week sit down and write down more formal takeaways, but I am excited by this slightly new direction in topology / personal account of living within, seeing, and understanding wireless existence, through its physical manifestation in the electromagnetic spectrum and its metaphorical manifestation as network, ether, and finally cloud.

The Ideas/Arrangement/Effect & User Journey:

and another moodboard that gives more aesthetic form to the actual appearance /feel of the performance:

As for AFFECTS, the visual portion detail something slightly different than the performer/performance aspect. The visuals, I hope denote the more nuanced, unpopular conceptions of the cloud (or that counter popular metaphors) and ultimately leave the viewer feeling both overwhelmed and melancholic. The performance, on the other hand focuses on the user portion and the return to human capacities for decoding and filtering. The portion of the cloud’s control and appeal is its creation of its user, and while ultimately I’m not sure how to break out of this, the signal loop is one way of living through / experiencing the shaping and molding of such a user, one where boundaries are not clearly demarcated. A takeaway and project that I resonated with was one where the artist (and its public) captures images of a military satellite that similarly peered down to take images of incidental passerby. It’s not surveillance or sousveillance or uncovering secrecy that may or may not exist. It’s recognizing entanglement and viewing it/ absorbing it with new tools of sensing.

For better clarity, here are the intended effects/affects of the visuals / performance:

 

Yesterday and today, I made a batch of different visuals, ones that accumulated from my readings:

…… ideas, marked yes for having tried:

Data Leak / mixing !!

Tube knotting (cable salad) cable salad cloud (yes)

Cable weaving yes (kind of)

Janus (cloud blob) appearing or disappearing (yes)

Signal looking at us looking at them (stars?) yes

Virtualization artifacts – when individual freedoms bleed into others

Fog increasing (limited aspect)

Using satellite imagery of cloud centers (yes)

Contact (yes)

private/public real/virtual reveal

All screenshots of these can be found here.

Some of my favorites: (cable salad, or Kabelsalat)

satellite / data bunker chunks

knot

 

I plan to send these to folks to get a sense of how they’re interpreted, and if they align with the intentions I laid out earlier.

 

In addition, I asked a few classmates/friends what their conception/understanding of the cloud was so that I wasn’t just acting in isolation, but here are some of my favorite responses:

There were a lot of reciprocal arrows in many peoples’ responses, going into and coming out of 1 thing (power of the metaphor!). I’m still collecting them, but have enjoyed what I’ve received thus far 😀

 

Finally, I did a verbal walk through of the performance w/ my friend who is slated to be the other performer and who hopefully isn’t scared out of doing it. There are definitely going to be some hurdles when we try it Friday, but I think it’s going to be an exercise of unprecedented strain.