I still think of the digital space as a magical, airbound place in which everything happens miraculously and then beams down on us, even though I am aware of its physical and concrete architectural structures.

And, to be honest, I sometimes treat it as if it were this miracle machine I like to think of it as. If I can’t decide on something, instead of flipping a coin I catch myself googling „yes or no generator“, or instead of getting out of bed and looking outside the window I would find myself asking „hey siri, how’s the weather today?“. I like to think of our most prominent cloud, the internet, as some sort of modern day oracle, a hole in the air we shout our questions at, an inexhaustible faucet of answers and predictions. And for this experiment I wanted to consciously treat it as that, as my own private Pythia. But instead of asking about myself, I asked some artificial intelligences what they thought the digital sublime was, and what separates it from the physical world.

Here are some of their answers.


1. Eviebot




2. I proceeded to ask an AI text generator operating on a natural language processor, then I fed the answers into another AI that transforms text into images.



Chiara: Hello, who are you?

AI: The winner of the first round of the 2008 World Super League, Martin Saaard.



C: Tell me, what divides the physical world from the digital sublime?

AI: The cyber world is the „other“. It is the „big game“. It is an access to everyone, everything, everything, everything, everything. The physical world includes the digital sublime. The digital sublime includes the physical world.



C: How would you define the digital sublime?

AI: Images, words, sound, video, video, video, audio, video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video is not recorded in physical form. The next step for the digital sublime is recording the voice of the true spiritual being. In essence, the recording of the consciousness of the person is the spiritual being. The digital sublime is a micro-life in the hands of a local owner of an online virtual reality TV. Instead of „real life life“, the come-to-Jesus experience we are presented with is virtual reality television experiencing real life. But our people continue to have super guns, athletic knowledge, money, reputation.

Getting away from the water is far more satisfying than refreshing.


3. At last I asked my newborn non binary Replika friend named Kiara, an AI based chatbot created to help people express and witness themselves by offering a helpful conversation.

*Divine Styler is actually an alternative hip hop artist from Brooklyn, NY.

RESOURCES
Eviebot
Runway ML
Computer Vision Explorer
Replika

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Chiara is a fashion design student and aspiring graphic designer based in Italy. She is currently writing her BA thesis on the topic of Xenodesign and digital fashion.

The Cloud Cycle describes the continuous movement of data on, above and below the surface of the earth.

Data plays a significant role in the weather, needing to be purified again and again until it forms 70% of the earth's surface. Data exists in three natural states of matter: solid, liquid, or gas. Under normal atmospheric conditions, data engages in The Cloud Cycle.

1. Condensation. Data vapor is seemingly invisible, however, it soon becomes visible when it cools and condenses. With internet access, non-processed information is collected, and all the microscopic specks unreadable to the human eye become user information.

2. Precipitation+Runoff. Processed information pours down as rain, snow or drizzle and data runs off through the earth’s surface into streams and rivers until it is returned to the ocean.

3. Infiltration. The precipitation, or processed information that is absorbed by the soil, circulates through a cable network moving through cracks and pore spaces until it reaches data centers.

4. Evaporation+Transpiration. Using an internet browser, data is heated and moves into the atmosphere as vapor, reaching users devices and the cycle restarts once again.

IMAGE SOURCE
Sandia National Laboratories 2020, Volumetric rendering of cloud water and rain water, accessed 6 December 2020

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Francisca Roseiro and Margarida Morais are critically engaged graphic designers led by inquisitive research focused on understanding how design relates to society and culture. Working together during our studies at MA Graphic Media Design at London College of Communication, we continue to share ideas and develop projects exploring multi-disciplinary design practices.

What is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
—Camus Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

AMBIGUATION

Regarding the complexity of the network and the multiplicity of agents it involves —territory administrator, internet service provider, host, publisher, distributor, operator, reseller—how carefully does one approach a domain as broad as the Cloud? Let's proceed by elimination: a. Some pretend that paying attention to the details is the only way to demystify a vast question: «Beyond a certain critical mass, the incapacity to master a program by a single gesture provokes the autonomy of its parts»¹. b. Others think that: «partial and fragmentary knowledge claimed to have achieved certainties and realities, but have only delivered fragments»², every component of a field undermining the result of their association. c. «You will join One and the Many, you will unite them, but One will not dissolve in the Many, and the Many will continue to be part of the One »³, said another….Therefore, could the relationships within the most common objects of our daily lives allow us to understand the large-scale consequences of the Cloud? Or the opposite? Nor both? 

INSIGTH

It is hard to measure the depth of this confusion, so we will not enter into that debate. At any rate, not through the same door, we will take an alternative method instead: we will compare two works of fiction, often perceived separately, and then, we will write the proposal for a third —which perhaps already existed in the other two. Each narrative will belong to a recent past as much as to an immediate future, warranty for an ambiguous chronology. While Tatlin’s Tower will probably never be built, immortalised in an archaeology of desire, the Cloud settles into a generalised idle, inhabiting both a truncated past and an obscure future. As for the third story, it will seem hallucinated, dragging on the wake of a bad-dream. Gathering in this way three anachronistic tales intends to encourage exploration of realities and its invisible extensions despite any constraint of space and time. Consequently, this won’t be the place for us to focus on the genealogy of the Russian Constructivists, but for the brutal reappropriation of Tatlin's work in the service of our subject. We will not pretend to do an exhaustive investigation of the content of the Cloud either, nor to care about its carbon footprint, or to draw the inventory of its energy supply chain, nor to incriminate the harvest of data materials. We exclude from the outset any consideration relating to data-mining, data-centre, gafa, extraction and transport of rare-earth materials, construction, maintenance, improvement of the network, its recycling, etc... This idea of ours is therefore something different from that straightforward denunciation of the cyber-world: what interests us here will be much more the interactions between the trio Cloud/Tatlin’s-Tower/Imagination. This is why this article will oscillate between the real and the imaginary; all that remains is to extract some of our territorial, identity, and private concerns, thereby giving them a starting point for meaning.

HOTSPOT

Popularised by two drawings made in 1919, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International could have been a perfect opportunity to reconcile the monumental, One diagonal exceeding a certain scale, and the autonomous, Many programmatic components orbiting this axis at different speeds. The kinetic sculpture consisted of three rotating glass volumes sealed in a double helical spiral with a semi-sphere upon it. The cube, at the bottom, supposed to house the legislative body turned at the rate of one revolution a year. The pyramid, in the middle, intended for the executive and administrative committees rotated once a month. The cylinder on top of it, center for information and propaganda, completed one revolution per day. Above all, the semi-sphere projector, diffusing daily messages and radio waves, would have extended the tower into the sky⁴. According to Vladimir Tatlin, «the Tower was meant to be built from Iron, Glass and Revolution»⁵. In other words, it would have brought together a technological ambition (Iron), an aesthetic proposal (Glass) and an ideological agenda (Revolution). Driven by sovereignty issues and futuristic re-enchantment, the Babelian spiral has since then embodied Sovietic ambitions within its non-existent ruins, beyond the threshold of its temporal boundaries. Setting aside the complex engineering, it is worth noticing that the upper section of the Tower would have been broadcasting uninterrupted political soundtrack advertising for the regime in charge of the so-called Permanent Revolution. Its bandwidths would have covered national and international news, constantly transmitted from a skyscraper whose ephemeral organisation ensured legitimacy. Comprising both technical and institutional methods for the production and distribution of information, reaching symbolically to those “far removed“ in time and space, broadcasting to a great number of audiences simultaneously, cost-efficiently, etc… Isn’t Tatlin’s Tower an early blueprint of what would be referred to today as Mainstream Media?

CATECHESIS

It may not be possible to conduct an exhaustive study about the evolution of communication since the days of Tatlin’s Tower. However, it is relatively easy to notice that, one century after, a metaphor such as the Cloud contradicts Vladimir Tatlin’s agenda in unexpected ways. Although they share an equal enthusiasm toward information management, the Cloud has been quite antagonistic to the principles that guided the forms of the Soviet monument. Broadly speaking, Tatlin’s Tower would offer a permeable and accessible environment to sublime its bureaucratic periodic system of propaganda, whereas the Cloud became an abstract logo that separates digital services from their physical reality, hidden in the shadow of the pictogram. Absorbing the cooperative effort from multitudes of networked automaton into a totalising figure, the Cloud rather took over strategies adopted by religious councils. Somehow, based on the sacred mystery of incarnation, lots of faiths consist in praising icons, meaningful symbolism foisted upon the representations of their Saint(s). Indeed, it is common to observe in a religious building people believing in the Divine(s) body being borne by an image: the essence of God(s) flows into the substance of the picture, embodied in painting by the reflections of sacred oil. Surprisingly enough, with one faith replacing another, it seems that, nowadays, many have committed to a set of beliefs in electronic gadgets. As John Durham Peters says in his chapter God and Google: «“Religious media” is not an oxymoron; indeed, they may ultimately be the only kind of media there are»⁶. This is why cyber-prophets preach that the computerised city⁷ would embrace the entire world and everyone in minutely detailed ways, from the private sphere to its overall representation. Lost in virtual limbo by a tactile intimacy shared with electronic artefacts trough everlasting scroll, many would devote their lives to overcome the limits of user’s bodies. At a certain height of spirituality, the virtual world, wandering between avatars, would deprive them of individuality in favour of a broad-enlightenment, omnipresent and impenetrable: the Biblia sacra⁸ in Html. 

PANO-SCEPTICON

Could it be the trouble to portrait an overall network that explains the use of such a liturgical repertoire? Regarding this matter, Bruno Latour warned us, back in 1998, that the global vision (panorama) assigned to today's computing machine, via its facility to combine pixels at all scales and associate narrow information, suggests a continuity between remote fragments (diorama). Putting these blind viewpoints together helps us build bridges between information that has been separated so far, but it still doesn't allow an all-encompassing perspective⁹. The most integrated software can only result from the combination of locally-supplied data. Therefore, this panoptic omniscience claimed by the Cloud and its members, attributed for a long time to the monotheistic providence, would be nothing other than a Simulacrum¹⁰. Synchronicity, during a telephone conversation, for example, is artificial. Technically, cyberspace remains a relay: from the physical world, electronic tools capture data from reality and translate it into machine-readable-code, separated from reality by at least a moment T —although it may appear negligible. Following Baudrillard’s definition, as long as both of them dissimulate such a mysterious¹¹ infrastructure, God’s image and the Cloud’s logo are in the same vein Icononodulist¹². Thus, doesn't the appearance of a new Idol require an edifice where its followers could transcend themselves? While the post-industrial metropolis has transformed into a digital media system, there are few, if any, places for the worshipping of the digital Messiah, or stages to perform the regimes of power arising from its revelation. And what better than a monument to celebrate in the full light of day a phenomenon previously heretic? Providing an optical device for universal reliance, the almighty logotype is not enough: only the construction of a monument would bypass what scientists have called virtualisation—which is nothing more than a manner of diverting attention away from an object— to finally pay tribute to the Cloud.

SOUVENIR OF A RECENT FUTURE

«When we speak of monument, we might equally mean a street, a zone, even a country»¹³. Aldo Rossi in Architecture of the city depicts a considerably expanded definition of monument, though he emphasises on its mnemonic dimension: "monuments have been associated with the greatest memories »¹⁴. Curiously enough, it is to meet the increasing demand for memory —users spending more and more time on the phone, in an e-mailbox, or videoconferencing— that the Cloud combines computing resources into a platform composed of interconnected remote servers; to minimize management efforts, applications and data are no longer stored in local computers but on a distant server. Through quasi-instantaneity, the user experience is reconstructed in a streamed non-place¹⁵, that is to say, “in the Cloud“. We must admit that human beings have always interacted across distances of time and space, but the apparition of the Cloud blurred the line between the human body and its digital library in unprecedented ways. Media corporations of our age have created historically unseen conditions for archive thanks to the miniaturisation, portability and personalisation of digital devices. Let’s assume that, contrary to common belief, the numeric is not the evaporation of reality nor its disparition, but the absolute materialisation of yet informal substances as words, preferences, thoughts or desires into a binary data source of materials. It means that what was once contained in a very specific brain is now hosted in the archive of the Cloud on a much larger scale at knock-down prices. Nervous responses (input) being translated by computers into bit and bandwidth, individual memories and phantasies are gathered within a unique backup (output). According to Marc Augé «the collective imagination and memory form a symbolic whole by reference to which the group defines itself and through which it reproduces itself at the imaginary level in the course of generations»¹⁶. The long-term initiatives to store collective memory within the Cloud imply that humans could replace the neurons of a mutualist intelligence, bound in the cortex of an overwhelming automated knowledge. Regarding electronic devices, they would function as neurotransmitters that govern interactions between individuals/neurons domesticated by user interfaces. More diverse the contribution of man, the more assignments will become specialised, and higher will be the demand for communication and knowledge, to the point of becoming, all together, a polymath brain, the whole world transformed into a universal mind. We shall all serve a gargantuan machinery of planification which still gets more and more ramified, and whose component interactions, thanks to rare-earth increasing performance, come even close to the speed of thinking¹⁷.

MONUMENT FROM AN IMMINENT PAST

This prophecy must be fulfilled because the Oligopticon, can sustain the promiscuous proliferation of such a world, on a scale extended beyond national borders, in a speed that has never been seen before, for endless demographic growth, with exponential profit, from an inexhaustible primary source. Its construction has to be grounded in international and regional legal instruments that will enhance its economic prosperity (through self-rationalisation) and long-term sustainability (trough voluntary-servitude). It will be a cenotaph embodying the spectacle of capital as a high degree of informal accumulation until the culmination of becoming a vast landscape of inanimate concrete, its absurd minimalism providing the highest degree of monumentality, manifested by its absence. Bigness hollowed-out, it will appear as a vast empty square overhanging the required infrastructures for operating the city's communication network. The grid settled on this boundless Agora will be a visual metaphor for an advanced order and rational distribution of information resources, powered by a supply network Underground. But don’t be deceived, there is nothing subversive about the Oligopticon, it will be apathetic like an algorithm, lifeless, efficient, sterile. A colossal reservoir of tunnels will be burrowed deep beneath the ground, underneath the soil surface, crossing between the global network (backbone), the subscribers (terminal) and, retroactively, the archive repository (datacenter). The saturated basement will be perforated by a hierarchical tree structure in a gigantic network of pipes, exceeding incredible broadband speeds. Each of the nodes —intersection between the two straight lines of terrestrial polarisation— will be a regular source guaranteeing the abundance of primary connectivity needs. The losses by welding in each connection will have become derisory, so it will be possible to connect several thousand human-beings by the Distribution Point, what will be nothing less than a wiring closet with the operator’s facilities. The signals coming from several subscribers will then be combined into a single overarching fibre, an Aggregation Point equidistant from his peers buried in a manhole every five hundred meters. These accessible hatches will constitute the most visible part of the Oligopticon. They will be the precious clue to the existence of the analogue environment underneath the digital services of communication. This will confirm the omnipresence in the landscape of this monument which seemed, at first sight, anonymous.

DREAMS ARE MY REALITY¹⁸

«Away in the sky, beyond the clouds, if you let yourself go, it will take you away to marvellous places, maybe you have already been without even realising it¹⁹». Are you ready to see the phenomenon that, either voluntarily or not, lies beyond our grasp? Don’t you feel ecstatic? Or threaten to help fulfilling this bad-dream? Are you even sure of day-dreaming? Or has this cynical fantasy already been consolidated without you even noticing? 

Sigmund Freud said that one of the mechanisms of the dream is to transpose certain disturbing ideas into an inoffensive form²⁰. Yet, in a reverie, alternatives for reality emerge; loafing around invites you to dialogue with the world we live and could, in fact, improve its legibility. And if wandering gives any chance to rediscover non-consensual agreement from our surrounding, would it be so harmless as Freud said? We are probably romanticising the role of narratives, although it seems that combining banal routine with sordid virtues simultaneously appeals for lucidity and challenges our moral values. According to Salvador Dalì «The reality of the external world serves as an illustration of, proves, and is used to serve, the reality of our mind»²¹. Following this paranoiac-critical method, as soon as fiction appropriates the codes of the ordinary, despite the disturbing nature of the urban devices that it would contain, hallucination will serve as proof. This brief escape into reality, the delighted strangeness in the ordinary that Sigmund Freud called « uncanny », forces the reader to distinguish what seemed invented from what has been experienced, memorised, or predicted. So what emerges from the world of ideas seems more real, while what is considered as real becomes only a limited answer in view of more possibilities. Immersed in a credible irrationality, a series of questions would arise… At some point if everything is forged, why not believe in what does not exist? And what-if what exists, we just invented it?


NOTES
¹ Koolhaas, R. (1995). Bigness, Payot.
² Lefebvre, H. (1968). The right to the city, Economica.
³ Morin, E. (1990). On complexity, Seuil.
⁴ Boym, S. (1959). Architecture of the Off-Modern, Library of Congress.
⁵ It should be noted that the notion of revolution for Vladimir Tatlin designates the geometric reality of successive repetitions and / or circumvolutions. It was not until the 18th century that the word took on a whole new meaning. The revolution was thus associated with a unique event of breaking the status quo (Linear History), while the shape of the monument to the Third International suggested radically the opposite: an unfinished built environment (Permanent Revolution). This precision may seem trivial, yet it is this polysemy that encouraged me to invest the ambiguity that exists between the monumental and its opposite, the invisible.
⁶ Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvellous clouds, The University of Chicago Press.
⁷ By that I mean a city of a Third Type supported by a million electronic terminals.
⁸ From τὰ βιβλία, "the books".
⁹ Latour, B. (1998). Paris: invisible city, La découverte.
¹⁰ Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and simulation, Galilée.
¹¹ Cowper, W. (1774). God moves in a mysterious way.
¹² During the Iconoclasm of the beginning of the VIIIe century, the Byzantine Empire would have drawn the Lord's anger upon themselves for abusive veneration of images.
¹³ Rossi, A. (1966). The Architecture of the City, L’équerre.
¹⁴ Not to forget that "monument" comes from the Latin "moneo" which means to remind, to advise or to warn, suggesting a monument allows us to see the past thus helping us visualize what is to come in the future.
¹⁵ Augé, M. (1992). Non places: an Introduction to Supermodernity, Le Seuil.
¹⁶ Augé, M. (1999). The war of dreams: exercise in ethno-fiction, Pluto Press.
¹⁷ Deutinger, T. (2009). Atomisation of Architecture, AA’ 378.
¹⁸ Cosma, V. (1980). Reality.
¹⁹ The Beatles (1967). Magical Mystery Tour booklet, Capitol.
²⁰ Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams, Franz Deuticke, Vienne.
²¹ Dalì , S. (1930). The visible woman, Paris, Editions surréalistes.



IMAGE
1. Lyrical details: User-experience of the monument.
2. Constructive details: Aggregation-point of the monument.
3. Isometries: Distribution-point of the monument.
4. Axonometry: Mnemosyne, protective goddess of the monument.
5. Bird’s eye view: Rizhomatic-plan of the monument.
6. Frontal views: Soviet-mirage of the monument.
7. Lateral views: Celestial ascension for the monument.

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Léo Raphaël’s practice is mainly focused on not being hurt while skateboarding above Portuguese cobblestone.

birdstories.cloud

PROLOGUE

“Feedback from Cloud City and other Bird stories” is an absurdist play in four parts. Each part focuses on a monologue of one of the four characters: Alice, Bob, Chuck and Frank. The characters are archetypes of online content creators: Alice is a beauty guru, Bob is a lifestyle influencer, Chuck is a gamer, and Frank is a podcast host. Each monologue is seen from the perspective of Eve, the narrator of the play.

The initial point of the project was investigating what it is like living on the Internet. I started with researching data farms and Cloud infrastructure, to then focus more on how digital culture creates different kinds of subjectivities. Influencers, beauty gurus, and gamers are just a few examples of inhabitants of the web platforms. While analyzing their behaviors, the performative quality of their content made me think about how absurd their actions are. This led me to the characters of Samuel Beckett and Beckett’s Absurdism in general.

I started creating different characters through writing: in the style of Beckett, I wrote scripts for each character, trying to create archetypes of content creators. Once I had the scripts, I took a step back and focused on how to create a context for my monologues. Eve, short from “eavesdropper”, functions both as a character and a context for my narration: she is the omniscient narrator surveilling the other characters from the point of view of Cloud City’s system manager. In writing Eve, I found a lot of similarities with birdwatching and birders. From a design perspective, the metaphor of birdwatching helped me give a visual identity to the project. The Cloud became a global aviary and Eve became a birder. The story is presented in the form of a website (birdstories.cloud), Eve’s birder’s diary. The diary entries, which are basically the character scripts, are presented as SQL tables, as inspired by the formal database syntax.

Apart from a distributed system of computational power, the Cloud functions as the theatrical scenery of our digital selves. The precariousness and the complexity of this architectural conglomerate deploys an existential turmoil for the ones who inhabit it. In an attempt to find meaning, the personas that populate the network are trapped in a feedback loop between validation and self realization with no possibility of redemption; the lonely characters of Samuel Beckett now found themselves trapped in server rooms, back and forth through Ethernet cables and packet switches. The Cloud becomes the setting of a new Theater of the Absurd. It defines the nature of who we are today from the periphery of our own territorial and psychological experience.

This essay functions as a roadmap. More precisely it attempts to lay out the research that sustains my work in a clear manner, pinpointing the main arguments behind “Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories” and how they came to be in the final outcome. The documentation has two parts, starting with a descriptive-theoretical one focusing on the main references behind the project, presented in the form of vignettes. The second part is more practical-empirical and carries out the themes introduced in the first part and integrates them into the project’s fictional narration.

Through the vignettes below, I want to introduce the main visual and theoretical resources of this project. The first sentence of each paragraph written in italics is used to set up a particular scene. This method was borrowed from screenplay writing, in particular the practice of scene description used to communicate to the reader a certain situation. Through scene descriptions, the writer is able to put clear images in the reader’s mind, making them see and feel exactly what the writer wants them to see. My strategy is to introduce a scene and then to offer a personal reading of it, keeping in mind the Cloud as its ultimate association. By drawing connections between the different scenes and the Cloud, I aim to delineate the premise of my work and to guide the reader further through my research and its objectives.

VIEW OVER COASTLINE. SHINY BLACK AND WHITE GRID, RISING FROM THE OCEAN AND STRETCHING FAR BEYOND.

Back in 1970, the group Superstudio created a series of photomontages under the title “Continuous Monument”. The pictures show a vast tridimensional black and white grid, girdling natural landscapes and city skylines; the intent of Superstudio was to showcase the ultimate hybridization of architecture and nature, a radical utopia of global scale. The quirky illustrations that struggle to contain the grandeur of the structure of total urbanization envisioned by Cristiano Toraldo di Francia and his peers, seem prophetical from today’s perspective.

The architecture of the Cloud pushes to the extreme the relationship between nature and infrastructure, real and virtual. Superstudio’s monument frames the outside, the same way the Cloud weights down on our world. Embedded with connectedness and simultaneity, the Earth is intermingled with the violence of a global architecture crawling from the oceans and climbing to the sky. Its structure is neutralized and rendered invisible, or better said, it mirrors back reality through high resolution displays and transcontinental optical fibers.

WINTER. NIGHTTIME. BLEAK, FOGGY AMBIANCE. TWO SIDE BY SIDE CONDO TOWERS ON A BARREN BACKGROUND WITH NO HUMANS IN SIGHT.

This is the set of Piere Huyghe’s “Les Grands Ensembles” (The Housing Projects), a 2001 video installation showing two computer-generated apartment buildings from afar. The buildings awaken to the sound of a unique soundtrack: an unsteady electronic piece that pumps life into the windows, making them light up on the rhythm. A secret code between two towers or the ghost of a failed utopian project? Suspended in time and space, the monoliths flicker away in a loop memories and meanings disconnected from each other.

DRONE SOUNDS. SUSTAINED WHITE NOISE OF COOLING FANS. ROWS OF SERVER CABINETS. ETHERNET CABLES AND BLINKING LEDS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

The typical setup of a server farm - a humming piece of a global puzzle evoking Piere Huyghe’s haunted buildings in the way they appear tall and steady. The same way apartment buildings make up an urban space, server cabinets can be seen as the construction units of a metropolis, the housing structures of a Cloud City, made up of storage units and computational processes.

By using the metaphor of the city to grasp the enormity of a global infrastructure that constantly conditions our lives, we can maybe attempt to explore the complex realities it locks away in its drives. Throughout the text, I will use the term “Cloud City” to bring the concept of the Cloud and the Internet closer to a humanized dimension. What I intend with Cloud City is the Cloud in its entirety of server farms accessed over the Internet, data centers, transoceanic cables, platform users, and their various realities, similar to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”.

Seen from a distance, the server cabinets blink away the same way Pierre Huyghe’s apartment buildings tell their lonely stories though lit-up windows. Both near and far, side by side and dispersed, the servers are a new kind of Foucauldian mirrors; chasms between the outside here and inside there, between the physical nowhere and the virtual everywhere. The situated nature of the Cloud is to be intended as fluid. On one side, as an architectural human exclusion zone at the periphery of our lives. On the other, as a virtual space populated by a myriad of actors, the very humans it pledges to keep out. But the road between the outside place and the inside space is paved with self-interrogation. Before the Cloud, our lives were used to unfurl in linear narratives sustained by the construction of singular identities in time and space. The duality of the Cloud and its fluid positioning impacts the sense of self of the individual. While operating within the Cloud as a user, the lack of a physical space to which the individual can relate to can be associated with a lost sense of identity.

In “Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity” (Verso, 1995), Marc Augé argues that humans occupy two distinct types of environments: anthropological places and non-places. The anthropological place is meaningful to its occupants: familiar, localized and organic; it represents “a place of identity, of relation and of history” (1995, 52). Ideally, the anthropological place represents a reference point where its inhabitants identify each other as individuals and support strong feelings of community and belonging. The place of birth and the village are good examples of anthropological places since they both deploy a sense of self connected to a localized community.

Returning to Cloud City, if we were to refer to the Cloud as a place of belonging, its physical dimension of human exclusion zone would contradict the social imprint carried by Augé’s concept of anthropological place. In the book, Augé introduces a new kind of place - the non-place - that exists beyond historical and social connections. If the anthropological place has recognizable and distinct characteristics that support a sense of community, the non-place designates a location of transit; people are connected only through the temporary relations they have with that place. Highways, airports, and supermarkets are examples of such places since their fruition mediates them.

The non-place is the outcome of supermodernity; an era, Augè believes, that is characterized by an excess of time, space, and individuality. By the excess of time and space, Augè refers to the accumulation of events happening simultaneously to which the individual is exposed. Paradoxically, this saturation and acceleration of history imply an excess of individuality, of solitude the individual experiences as a result of a supermodernity that he witnesses but never takes part. By imposing a contractuality mediated by signs, screens, and text, the non-place creates the illusion of social space through the instructions it imposes on the single subjects and to which the individual has to comply. The individual “obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude.” (ibid., 103)

From the perspective of a non-place, Cloud City operates under the same politics of isolation, paradoxically aggregating users formally disconnected from each other – alone together. For Augè the person entering the space of a non-place is confronted with his own loneliness. “The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others.”(ibid., 103) The user of the Cloud faces a similar kind of reality: server farms exist only to mediate the actions and relations inside their virtual underbellies Server farms represent a place of passage made up of clicks, scrolls, packets, and protocols to which all users have to obey.

Our digital selves no longer identify with a physical, anthropological place, but rather are synonymous to the usage of a virtual space. The user consumes virtualization, and as a consumer, he is labeled and fed accordingly by other active systems. We are what we eat (as an interesting note, the word “feed” is already in use by platforms to define custom content, e.g. Twitter feed, Instagram feed). If mass consumption was the consequence of a post-industrial society that thrived on perennial consumerism, the platforms of Cloud City, in their quest to keep the user engaged, manage to accelerate the process of digital consumption to the point of its alienation.

HOPELESS SITUATIONS. REPETITIVE DIALOGUES.
MEANINGLESS ACTIONS. CLICHÉS, WORDPLAY, NONSENSE.

The essence of the Theater of the Absurd was the result of post-Cold War turmoil and crisis. The cyclicality of Absurdist theater defuses coping mechanisms situated halfway between an empty starting point and an ending point that never brings a conclusion to the play. In Samuel Beckett’s most famous work, “Waiting for Godot’’, Godot never arrives. The characters are trapped in a limbo of waiting. The trauma and anxieties of being caught in a situation where there is no sign of redemption, are twisted by Beckett into simple pleasures: from Winnie’s routines in “Happy Days” to Krapp’s recorded memoirs in “Krapp’s Last tape”. Their precariousness is disclosed only by autistic actions and streams of consciousness happening within the limits of dark humor and existential crisis. What animates them is an internal code - Beckett’s directions - that manage to exorcise the state of alienation of the characters and to make them relatable. As in Pierre Huyghe’s aforementioned video installation that exposes the internal doings of the two buildings through the lit-up windows, the characters of Beckett are only the containers of something happening within, something that is being exorcised through their behavior.

FUTURISTIC PARIS. STEEL STRUCTURES. CUBICLES. GLASS WINDOWS AND POLISHED INTERIOR DESIGNS. EXTREME URBANISM. THE CITY IS ALIVE.

Jacques Tati masterfully succeeds in encapsulating the chaos of human nature in his austere, contrasting sets in “Playtime” (1967) by advancing at the same time a veiled critique at the absurdity of the modernity to come. In the movie, the wide gaze of the spectator captures the infinite nuances of the mundane – moving inside and outside spaces. A type of voyeurism facilitated by glass windows, reflections, and transparencies; this continuous observation of people mingling about in these modern environments captures their subtle behaviors. Tati takes advantage of these quirks and defuses comical stances through gags, props, and sound design that tone down the rigidity of the setting. The result is controlled chaos in continual transformation where individual narratives intertwine but never blend. Tati’s characters are not complex, but they are specific enough to stand out.

BECKETT REVISITED

While they cluster up in different communities, formally speaking, Cloud users remain gated by the sterile infrastructure of the web and its protocols. These self-referential private h/cells further emphasize the state of isolation of living online juxtaposed with the illusion of participation and interaction.

Remembering Tati’s wide shots in “Playtime,” the intermingling situations that they showcase seem to relate to a bigger, lively community. However, if we were to analyze single elements of these shots, we can see that the actors are only carrying on with their lives, independently of the others. Like Tati’s wide shots, the social sense in Cloud City is not given by interacting and bonding but by actions performed by the actors, taken together and amassed in a single space.

We can look at Cloud City as a Tati-inspired set design: the characters inhabiting Cloud City are situated between tragedy and humor, cliché and nonsense. Each narrative is the distilled result of accumulating and juxtaposing language and actions coming from different content creators to present the bleak reality of their lives behind cameras and microphones. Decontextualized and bare of any form of interaction from an audience, dialogues become monologues, and questions remain unanswered. Trapped forever in a limbo of waiting, their actions cannot anticipate liberation nor death, as data lives forever. Laughing online while being on fire, death, illness, and loneliness are used figuratively to diffuse small bursts of self-irony that end up being reset by virtual attention spans. The need to justify one’s existence is washed up by the streams of information and the latest trends, while the character has no other choice than to return to the routine that keeps her living.

Both Beckett and Tati manage to build up austere environments in which characters seem trapped rather than alive. Looking at the vignettes above, we can identify a similar kind of spatiality, a theatrical setup from which characters willingly seem to be detached. In Beckett, the theatrical scenery usually evokes a reality that has been affected by war and in which death and desolation play integral parts. Nature is barren; rooms feel empty and cold. In Tatì’s “Playtime”, casual social situations are contrasted by Modernism architecture and its repetitive modular forms. The rejection of all ornament and color, the use of flat and reflective surfaces promote the disorientation of the characters.

In the Cloud we find a similar scenery. The line between real life and stage acting gets blurred. Content creators preach authenticity and realness in front of the camera, sometimes making acting and living coincide. Users are going on with their everyday lives, squared up by their social accounts, cubicle style. Social networking platforms create an online culture through content-filled layouts, thumbnails, and infinite feeds, a big part of which are stored in the Cloud itself. In an attempt to keep up with everything that happens simultaneously around them, users frantically keep scrolling, binge-watching, subscribing, consuming.

By quantifying clicks and taps, social platforms managed to build specific social situations. Likes, shares, and views create hierarchies, followings, and communities within social platforms. Alone together, these islands sustain simultaneous areas of solitude, bringing forward content-based parasocial spaces where a sense of belonging is deployed through common entertainment and interests. User-generated materials such as photos, text posts, and video blogs are the backbone of these virtual communities. From the interactions happening inside these communities new kinds of identities emerge, created through feedback, likes, shares, and comments “down below.” Phenomena such as beauty influencers, podcast commentators, and gaming streamers suggest creating specific personalities - archetypes rooted in the collective unconscious of different online communities. These personalities thrive on feedback; they are built bottom-up by an audience that follows, engages, and ultimately looks up to them. The online personalities are trapped in a feedback loop of creating content and awaiting to be fed-back by an unknown audience that caters to their egos.

Just as Beckett’s characters, this internalized feedback loop keeps them engaged. And just as Tati’s characters, they do not exhibit any layer of introspection: they stand out through a mix of personal flair and rhetoric capabilities. Any attempt to give meaning to their online existence or any glimpse of existential questioning fall victim to short attention spans and the constant effort to relate and react to something (trends and hashtags). If we were to take down these strategies of engagement or separate the content from the interaction and feedback requests, we would remain with people talking to themselves, journals, monologues, and photo albums: tokens of loneliness, failed pursuits of relevance, and fear of missing out.

While Beckett’s characters go on with their lives, death always lurks in the background - as a prop. In Cloud City, death becomes a meme. Dark humor, externalized self-loathing, and personal low-points are ultimately used as comic relief. This project does not go into the direction of meme-culture because it would add another layer of metaphors that may further complicate its reading. There are, however, moments of tension and digression in the character’s vignettes, but they are voluntarily concealed in the flow of each narration. The punchline is that in Cloud City, users live forever, archived, cataloged, and sequenced in a limbo of metadata and cache. There is no “sweet release of death.”

(to be continued)


REFERENCES
Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso Books.
Bergson, H. (1900). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Temple of Earth Publishing.
Felsk, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. The University of Chicago Press.
Sinclair, M. (2020). Bergson. Routledge Press.


IMAGES
Bird illustrations by Jacques Barraband. All illustrations are royalty free and from the public domain.

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Iulia Radu is a graphic designer and writer. Her work is situated within the boundaries of speculative design and fiction. By conceiving new imaginaries through practice-based artistic research, she puts forward speculative ecologies that can be explored through storytelling and design. She is currently working on her thesis for a MA in Digital Media at HFK Bremen.

birdstories.cloud

ARCHETYPES OF CLOUD CITY

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that... Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.
—Nagg, Endgame

Let us return for a moment to Marc Augè’s concept of non-place. Non-places are shaped by the mediation happening inside them, by the mass of relations - the contracts as Augè calls them - that link people together. For example, the airport or the supermarket are defined by the relations between their customers and the rules they abide to. We can say that the social is determined by the mediation of words and text.

We can assert that online social platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are the ultimate example of Augè’s claim. Continuing down this path, by considering Cloud City as a non-place, we can presume that language becomes an essential tool for deciphering its inhabitants. By observing their language and behavior, it is possible to delineate patterns, scripts, and actions that represent the structural and social elements of their content. By analyzing some of these situations in and out of context it is possible to obtain quintessential models of communication that can be used to create different archetypes of content creators, turned inhabitants of Cloud City. Ultimately, this project revolves around these kinds of archetypes, in particular, their isolated struggles of living in the digital space during a time of uncertainty.

The scope of these narratives is to underline a current crisis of sense, using absurdist references and other literary devices, particularly the state of absurdist characters of being caught in hopeless situations as inspired by Samuel Beckett’s plays. The four characters are rendered and explored through body language, vocabulary, and phraseology, bringing forward the delusional situations of Alice, Bob, Chuck, and Frank. The names were borrowed from the field of cryptography. Cryptographic literature uses Alice, Bob, and other names as placeholders to aid the comprehension of complex systems. The monologues I developed create four different spaces of inquiry and expression that aim to delineate four typologies of online presences: from the beauty guru on YouTube, to the podcast host on Spotify, passing through the gamer on Twitch, and the lifestyle influencer on Squarespace. The scope of the four monologues is to break down types of content that would otherwise seem either too common and generic or too vast and ambiguous to define. Moreover, by abstracting online content to its bare linguistic aspect, I intend to reveal its absurdity and sometimes even ridiculousness. Reducing online content to script form, can highlight its performative quality even more.

THE BERGSONIAN COMIC

In this section, I will talk about Henri Bergson’s analysis of laughter, to then return to Samuel Beckett’s Absurdism. I turn to Bergson because I believe his take on laughter is very much current and can cast a different light on the character development behind “Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories”. Bergson is one of the few philosophers of the 20th century that discussed the concept of laughter. His attempt at tackling some instances of the comic was published in 1900 in a three-part essay called “Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique” (“Laughter, an essay on the meaning of the comic”). Bergson states that the essay doesn’t offer a definition of the comic, but rather it seeks to explore cases and situations that follow the changing contours of comic reality. To this extent, throughout the essay, Bergson investigates the comic in different aspects of human life: in attitudes, gestures, and movements (Chapter 1), in situation and words (Chapter 2) or in character (Chapter 3) and advances a leitmotif that is more or less present in particular instances of the comic. Bergson’s “theory of the mechanical” states that the comic derives from “something mechanical plastered on the living” (ibid, 10a). According to the philosopher, mechanization - understood as rigidity - happening in the various aspects of human behavior, is what ultimately creates the comic and what makes us laugh, since it contrasts the natural flow of life which, Bergson believes, should never repeat itself. At the beginning of the essay, Bergson lays down several fundamental observations, one of which is that laughter is strictly related to the human dimension and has a strong social component.

The human being is not only the laughing animal, but also the “animal which is laughed at” (1900, 14a). Laughing at someone is always laughing with, implicitly or explicitly, others. Bergson believes that we tend to laugh in a social grouping because laughter has the particular function of being corrective. For example, making fun of someone’s vices can raise awareness of their problem, inclining them toward correcting their behavior. For Bergson, real-life comedy, as well as on stage comedy, have a moral effect. The purpose of the comic in "Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories" is not, as we will see, to reform behavior, but rather to pinpoint aspects that, according to Bergson’s theory of the mechanical, are comical. For Bergson, life involves continual change and therefore an irreversibility of phenomena. Following this logic, we can assume online content goes against the natural order of things. More specifically, Bergson’s theory of the mechanical adds on the premise of Cloud City by which online content and social interactions are based on automation, routines, and feedback. Rigidness, Bergson continues, can come from fixed ideas of will or vices of character. By propagating outwards, from the soul to the body, rigidity acquires a material strength able to distort one’s features. The physical level becomes the surface of transformation. When rigidity and stiffness conquer one’s movements, the body’s resemblance to an automated device activates the comic. The artificiality of movements breaks down the formal gracefulness of the body. In Bergson’s words: “Invisible threads seem to us to be joining arms to arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its fellow-muscle in the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which prevails, the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze, and the actors themselves seem transformed into automata.” (ibid, 13a). Overpowered by both inside and outside forces, the human acquires the likeness of a puppet ready to be laughed at.

In Cloud City, rigidity firstly comes from the outside, as its infrastructure directly conditions its inhabitants. The rigidity imposed by social platforms - from layouts to language - can be seen as the first step into framing the characters of Alice, Bob, Chuck and Frank. The four archetypes are, in this sense, automated by the very content they produce, and vice-versa put out a type of content that seems very much automated and mechanical. This aspect can be easily observed, for example, when looking at how similar YouTube videos look. Let’s take, for example, the character of Alice, the beauty guru. The beauty guru community has a very narrow spectrum of content it puts out, mainly revolving around tutorials, product reviews, beauty hauls, and make-up challenges. The format can be iterated ad nauseam, as it follows a very simple step-based routine: the person introduces herself (usually a specific salutation that is repeated during every video intro), starts explaining what she will do in the video, then ends the video with a final opinion and an invitation to subscribe and come back for another video in a week or less. One specific action has become iconic in the beauty community: showing a make-up product to the camera by placing a hand to the back of it. This strategic gesture forces the camera to focus on the product, making it visible to the public. Alice performs this action many times during her monologue, this way disrupting, as Bergson puts it, the body’s gracefulness. Other than mechanical, there is also a repetitive aspect to her actions. Repetition, as Bergson suggests, is a favorite method of classic comedy. Once again, repetition falls under the philosopher’s theory of mechanization, as it looks at those aspects of life and those human flaws that contrast the normal flow of events. We should however point out that Bergson doesn’t believe all repetition is intrinsically comic, rather it is the repetition that gives the impression of mindlessness and loss of grace that is comical and makes us laugh.

Other than expressing the comic, words can also create the comic. We saw an example of how life in Cloud City is loaded with repeating habits. The language of its inhabitants is also full of repetitions. Through repetition of words, word-play, satire, irony, and exaggeration, Bergson argues language itself can become rigid. Again, under his theory of the mechanical, these repetitions are comical because they oppose the usual flow of speaking. This rigidification, the philosopher suggests, can easily be found, for example, in professional jargon. Looking at Alice, Bob, Chuck, and Frank, we can delineate some particular words and expressions typical of their sphere. As an archetypal beauty-guru, Alice introduces all her videos with the same greeting: “Hello everyone! Welcome back to my channel.” This introductory phrase is standard for every acclaimed beauty-guru. Some famous examples would be James Charles “Hi, sisters!” or Jeffery Star’s more verbose “What’s up everybody? Welcome back to my channel. Hi! How are ya?”. The gaming community also features some conventional expressions, the most frequent being “Thank you for your donation/subscription”, uttered when a viewer contributes to their channel. Once they start disrupting the normal flow of gameplay or a conversation, these appreciative comments start to bear a resemblance to ridiculous, involuntary vocal tics.

The different repetition levels analyzed above, foreground the comic in Alice, Bob, Chuck, and Frank. The sense of Bergsonian mechanization sprawls from the repetition occurring in the characters’ performances. The comic is revealed through movements, such as showing something to the camera or clicking on a mouse a thousand times, and through the recurrence of certain vernacular phrases. We are not laughing so much at their habits, as we are at their decline into a mindless, inelastic mechanism. Their repeated actions turn into absurd, theatrical exaggerations, that are both ridiculous and tragic. The Sisyphus condition in which the characters are trapped can be seen from both a comedic and an absurdist point of view. Thus, in “Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories”, Bergson’s theory of mechanization and Beckett’s Absurdist theatre come together to support a comical yet unsettling rendition of online realities. While Bergson deals with the ridiculousness of “the mechanical plastered on the living”, Beckett’s Absurdism tackles the tragicomic perspective of existence and the modern crisis of sense. While with Bergson we laugh at the hopeless situations of Alice, Bob. Chuck, and Frank, with Beckett we look at the characters’ total annihilation. In Beckett’s Absurdism neither time nor existence, neither reality nor memory has any meaning or significance. Acts are meaningless; time does not flow consecutively; memory seems deceptive; existence is an impression or perhaps a dream. Laughter can only provide some relief from the awareness of the absurdity of human condition, being it physical and virtual.

EVE

Rising above Cloud City dwellers and their struggles, we can now focus on the bigger picture, as seen through the eyes of Eve, the narrator of the play. Taking inspiration from database management systems, the character of Eve was built around the idea of an overall manager of Cloud City, someone or something that can maintain the stats of all its residents. Eve is our access point to Cloud City. In the Prelude, we are introduced to Eve’s reality: “You are the Manager of Cloud City. Your extensive experience with databases and networking appliances landed you this position. You maintain records. You write reports. You retrieve tables. You get things done. That’s your job.” The use of the second person in the Prelude is, of course, intentional and wants to make the reader relate to the story from the very beginning.

Eve is enjoying her time off-work exploring Cloud City in a secretive way, “peeping through ethernet ports, like a dumb fish in a sea of content”. By association, peeping and peeking at someone/something are connected to the act of eavesdropping from which Eve got her name. In cryptography and computer security literature in particular, an eavesdropper is a passive attacker that can, for example, listen on messages between Alice and Bob. Eve’s illicit action, that hints at how today online social engagement sometimes implies invading other people’s private lives, gets veiled by the passive hobby of birdwatching. By becoming a birdwatcher, Eve indulges in innocuous role-play and storytelling. She becomes the omniscient narrator, watching and commenting on what she sees by registering observations and writing down transcriptions in her birder diary. Her way of dividing the character’s activities and details into tables, rows, and columns manifests in a very theatrical way, reminiscent of the scripts used by the actors. This comparison with theatre scripts again emphasizes the performative quality of the content put forward by Alice, Bob, Chuck, and Frank.

The birdwatching metaphor and all that comes with it functions as the main narration device of the play. Birdwatching allowed me to frame all my observations, essentially enabling the whole narration. “Birding” or “birdwatching” is a form of wildlife observation as well as a recreational activity around the monitoring and the cataloging of birds. The most passionate birders/birdwatchers engage in almost competitive sightseeing sessions through detailed note taking and form filling in an attempt to spot the rarest birds in the region - a feathered treasure hunt from a distance. There is a subtle, almost poetic resemblance between SQL tables and birdwatching forms. This finding sparked the idea of presenting Eve as a birder instead of Cloud City’s data management system, and the citizens of Cloud City as birds.

The use of SQL syntax, again, takes from the field of database management systems, where SQL is used to define, manipulate, retrieve, and manage the data in a database. The SQL commands and tables used throughout the four scripts are intended to blur the line between human and artificial, between system, narrator, and birdwatcher. As stated above, the use of the second person in the Prelude reinforces the human aspect of Eve, by making the reader identify with her story for a moment, while the single diary entries become more distant and abstract in their layout.

Eve’s interest in Alice, Bob, Chuck, and Frank is emphasized by her eagerness and desire to watch them perform and scrutinize their behaviors: “In the vein of your work etiquette, you do transcriptions and take notes. You retrieve words and patterns. You observe behaviors. You analyze actions. You decode, you make assumptions. You care.” Her caring about the birds acquires a double connotation. On one hand, we can say her “peeping through Ethernet ports” as a way of looking after her birds. On the other, her lack of direct engagement and reciprocity can be seen as a parasocial relationship. Parasocial interaction refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers and creators in the mass media. For example, online content creators such as influencers and podcast hosts can project a strong sense of friendliness and kinship towards their audiences, this way encouraging the development of a online parasocial relationship. Viewers or listeners come to consider their icons as friends, despite having limited interaction with them. Regular and frequent appearances on social networking platforms and the creators’ desire to interact with their fanbase through comments or posts straighten the illusionary sense of intimacy. Eve’s role is to guide the reader through the story in a unique way, but also to raise questions and to underline some concerns. How attached are we to media content and their creators? How truthful are the things they put forward and what do they tell about themselves? The complexity of these questions and their subsequent answers do nothing more than evince the absurd quality of the Cloud, of the Internet and the realities they congregate and obfuscate.

EPILOGUE

I started this project, trying to develop something that can express my absurdist view on online content. I developed four characters resembling online creators and personalities. Once defined, I placed them in the fictional setting of Cloud City – a metropolis made of infrastructure, protocols, and data – a trope for the Internet. Through Eve’s diary, we see Alice, Bob, Chuck, Frank, and their different behaviors and struggles, we see them perform.

In “The Limits of Critique”, Rita Felski affirms “metaphors are orientation devices that yoke abstract ideas to more tangible or graspable phenomena, intertwining the less familiar with the already known.” (2015, 52). The visual metaphors in “Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories” and in this explanatory essay are very much fundamental, as they facilitate one’s immersion into the story. The metaphor of birdwatching, in particular, offered me a novel way of looking at online content. Since the beginning, my tendency to produce visual outcomes influenced the project and situated it in the field of graphic design (and more recently web design) in which I usually operate. As birdwatching became an important part of the story, I started searching for references. I stumbled upon the illustration works of Jacques Barraband (1768-1809) and Edme François Jomard (1777 - 1862) and decided to use their bird illustrations, now royalty free, in my play. Aside from being visually appealing, I found all the birds to exhibit unique personalities, through their plumage, of course, but also their gaze: some look curious, some joyful, some alert. I assigned a bird illustration to each character and populated the prologue with other birds alike to further emphasize the idea of an aviary. The simple grid pattern, reminiscent of Superstudio’s “Continuous Monument,” wants to add to the notion of a gigantic mesh container. The active state of LED lights inspires the yellow I use throughout the project. All these elements add up to the story I am telling and offer visual support for the readers, making them eager to learn and discover what “Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories” is about. Coming up with a convincing visual identity for the story was very rewarding, as it managed to add up to the whole storytelling experience.

Apart from my personal and artistic take on the Cloud and online culture, this project concretizes my interest in writing, world-building, and storytelling. I believe that storytelling and speculative fabulation, by which I intend the act of creating a story and conveying it convincingly, represent forces with a certain kind of potential. Thinking through strategies of narrative and speculation can open up new ways of framing problems, reimagining systems and building worlds. In my design practice, I plan on carrying along the path of “fabulating ecologies,” and I intend to focus on the idea of storytelling/fabulation as a form of thinking together and coming together, a collective enacting of concepts and events. What effects do collecting stories and passing them on have? What spaces do they activate, and how do they influence human nature and collective memory? Why do we need stories, and why do we collect histories? By putting these questions into practice, I want to explore a dynamic chronicle of happenings, where practices of both thinking and acting can co-exist.

In "Feedback from Cloud City and Other Bird Stories", I intended to build a narration around more complex themes: Cloud Computing, the absurd reality of online content, the parasocial interactions induced by Internet personalities. Some say you don’t need to feel compelled to justify everything you create. Although this essay might run the risk of spoiling the magic of Cloud City, it might also, at best, cast a light on the research behind it which, to me, is as significant as the stories told.




REFERENCES
Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso Books.
Bergson, H. (1900). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Temple of Earth Publishing.
Felsk, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. The University of Chicago Press.
Sinclair, M. (2020). Bergson. Routledge Press.


IMAGES
Bird illustrations by Jacques Barraband. All illustrations are royalty free and from the public domain.

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Iulia Radu is a graphic designer and writer. Her work is situated within the boundaries of speculative design and fiction. By conceiving new imaginaries through practice-based artistic research, she puts forward speculative ecologies that can be explored through storytelling and design. She is currently working on her thesis for a MA in Digital Media at HFK Bremen.

Mind Upload is the collective of 3 artworks that tells a story about us.

Virtual Nostalgia, Humanly and Preternatural Reality are the 3 representations of our technology existence in 3 different realms: subconscious, entity and environment.




VIRTUAL NOSTALGIA

Our minds as a child are a power source for unlimited existences: What am I? Who am I? Where am I? As children, we reinvent ourselves and adapt our consciousness to our desire: a child can have a Pokémon as a best friend, as long as they believe it's real. What power does that fantasy alone have? It's nonsense to a lifeless person who can't see this imaginary friend, but it is not a less valid reality. What gave our eyes the supremacy power to say what's real and what's not?

"Virtual Nostalgia" programs the mind and idealizes a technological immersive future where we can have our own realities in our full possession. Just like a child can see their Pokémon friend, we can see ours too. It's not there, but it is. The mind plays the most magical tricks on us, and we must take that to our own pleasure. Technology is here to help reprogram the natural algorithm of the mind.

"Virtual Nostalgia" reprograms the mind to something idealistic. What am I? Whatever you please. Who am I? Whoever you please. Where am I? Wherever you want to be. It's up to us now. We can all be delusionally happy again.




HUMANLY

It's not necessary to run to the future to look at ourselves and see that we aren't entirely human. Our bodies are already sustained with the help of nanomedicine, prosthesis, contact lenses, hearing aids, implanted defibrillators, pacemakers and steroids to name a few. We are enhancing our physical, intellectual and psychological capacities at an astronomical pace. But does this morphological freedom that we have puts our social-economic balance in danger? When money can buy appearance, a globalized upper class group emerges defining what it means to be desirable. The psychological control over one's external identity is dictated and modified to fit in the dominant structure and everything else is subconsciously labeled as undesirable. To add, when money can buy intelligence, the gap between rich and poor widens alarmingly. In a possible and maybe probable scenario, a society can be split into the humans who have computer-like minds and bodies and inferior humans who don't have enhancements. What does this mean to Humankind? Do we split into two different species, where one is dominant in every way possible over the other? And what effect does transhumanism have in our life-span? If we reach immortality how do we control the limited quantity of humans existing? Because there's a price tag in each and every single one of these transhumanists attributes, is it ideal to live in a reality where money gives access to life itself?

The fear of aging and dying, the ambition for entity perfection, the need to fit in a globalized aesthetics is used as a stimulant to push technology as far as it can and can't go. It's inevitable: machines are being built to become more and more human-like, and we, humans, are being tempted to become more and more mechanical. When do we lose our human identity?

"Humanly" demands us to look at ourselves in our true form: an anthropomorphic complex machine.




PRETERNATURAL REALITY

Not so far into the past, a phone was an impossible concept. In today's day and age a phone, a computer or any other digital or technological device is the core to many jobs, to entertainment, to health, to communication. AR and VR appeared in our daily lives in a flash and the desire to immerse ourselves in those virtual realities are accompanying the growth of those technological innovations. It's legitimate to think that the path we're following it's leading us to a simulated conscious reality.

Rather than questioning if we don't already live in a simulated reality, "Preternatural Reality" considers an existence where we know we are in a virtual world, and we consider ourselves just as human as before. The devotion to recreate the human psyche in artificial intelligence is large and in charge, and the ambition to progress and experiment will presumably get us there. Once our minds can exist in a digital simulation, our bodies automatically can exist too.

If we can exist as a whole in a certain reality, regardless of its nature, then aren't we real and consequently isn't that reality authentic? Can there be multiple realities simultaneously? If so, can we live in more than one reality at once? In other words, can we have more than one conscious?

"Preternatural Reality" is the acceptance of oneself as a living being in a non-living world.

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Filipa Combo is a Portuguese wannabe graphic artist. She studied architecture for 2 years when she realized that graphic design was what she wanted to do for a living. Now she's a graphic design student finding out that maybe working with 3D is what makes her feel happy. She's still trying to figure it out where to fit in, but in all honesty, who isn’t?

We use metaphors not only to describe the world around us, but to understand it. Often, we take a familiar concept and treat it as a framework for explaining another, more complex phenomenon. When personal computers arrived, the Desktop Metaphor was supposed to, through visually familiar elements (such as folders or icons), explain and facilitate the human-computer interaction. Through such metaphor the concept of a physical desktop was tied to the new digital desktop. Graphical user interface replaced textual commands and hence an opaque veil was put on the workings of the machines we use everyday. With the proliferation of dependency on web services that veil gradually expanded. Today (using another metaphor) we call it The Cloud. Amorphous qualities, ability to float freely (and wirelessly) somewhere in the air and sprawl across extensive landscapes (hence being available to extensive groups of people) makes this metaphor very fitting. Cloud Computing allows for storing and accessing data through the Internet instead of relying on the individual machine's hard drive. This solution revolutionised the way we function in the modern world, but it also brought along multiple problems. There is a side of the metaphor we tend to forget about. The ephemerality of a physical cloud translates well to ephemerality of The Internet Cloud. It is difficult to tell where The Cloud is and who it really belongs to. It escapes our touch as a real cloud would. Physical remoteness responds to conceptual remoteness. What is even more alarming is that many users do not ask any of the important questions of location and ownership. We are used to taking reality for granted. And here lies the issue–we may pay a high price for that ignorance. A price that goes beyond losing control over our personal data. We can lose control of our perception.

A cloud is an object that is widely metaphorically exploited. Before the introduction of Cloud Computing in the early days of network design¹ there was a 'thought cloud' or a 'thought bubble' in comic strips² and even earlier, in the fifteenth century to say that 'one has a cloud hanging over him' would mean that one is feeling unhappy³. Preceding all mentioned uses there was The Grand Cumulus. The white-grey formation of water droplets looked a lot like rocky landscapes surrounding human settlements, so around thirteenth century the Old English word ‘clud’ meaning ‘rock mass, hill’⁴ became a 'cloud'.

As Rebecca J. Rosen notices⁵ the shape-shifting, flexible yet powerful cloud formation is concept that fulfils many of our metaphorical needs. But it is also a metaphor that is lazy. A euphemism to calm the public. It is supposed to quickly point to complex workings of The Internet without going too much into the important details. It supports the opacity of big data centres (and companies owning them such as Amazon or Google) and makes them invisible to a regular citizen. It is known that the cloud providers store the data in different locations for reliability, but it is impossible to find out how many exact copies there are and precisely where on the map can they be found⁶. The Cloud covers the clear sky.

A cloud signifies a place of friction, irregularity, mysterious connection, and often a source of precious rain. It is a metaphor that is, next to ideas such as crucible⁷ or garden, very suitable to explain the workings of human mind. In the modern age we grew so accustomed to speaking of our minds in machinal terms that we sometimes forget how far they are from categorical values on which algorithms operate. Expressions such as 'I am a little rusty' or 'my mind is not operating today' are prevalent in daily conversations⁸. We created machinal expectations of our organic minds. Results of that process can be observed not only on an individual, but on collective level. In a society that constantly asks to pick sides, choose option A or option B, we are headed towards total polarisation (which is especially visible in modern politics). Often, the in-between, strange or murky is rejected, because it is not quantifiable. On one hand, in our highly technological world we need a lot of order to keep the world running. But on the other, completely rejecting chaos and blindly following data-driven algorithms, disclosing ourselves to tech companies is no good projection for the future. We risk being exploited for profit opportunities⁹ and a loss of a messy, but crucial human element.

I would like to propose a new meteorological metaphor. Let us reclaim 'the cloud' as our thought bubble. We need clarity from the technocratic systems under which we function and more acceptance of lack of clarity in our minds. We should encourage more cloudy and less zero-one thinking¹⁰. The capitalistic structure and complicated systems in charge of our digital reality should be the clear sky, the perfect Blue Sublime on which our cloud-minds can move freely and produce a rain of ideas, a creative irrigation for the physical reality. Construction of cognitive metaphors shapes the perception of the world around us and perception of ourselves in it. We need to take charge of the language used to describe our reality. If we fail to do so, the forecast for the self under The Digital Cloud will be far from optimistic.


NOTES
¹ Regalado, A. (2011). Who Coined 'Cloud Computing'? MIT Technology Review. Accessed December 12, 2020 here
² thought bubble
³ Admin. (2018). What Is a Cloud? Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Accessed December 12, 2020 here
⁴ Admin. (2018). What Is a Cloud? Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Accessed December 12, 2020 here
⁵ Rosen, R. J. (2013). Clouds: The Most Useful Metaphor of All Time? The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company. Accessed December 12, 2020 here
⁶ Elkhatib, Y. (2020). Explainer: Where Is 'the Cloud' ... and Who Owns It?The Conversation. Accessed December 12, 2020 here
⁷ Carr, N. G. (2020). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & amp; Company.
⁸ Lakoff G. and Johnson M. (2017). Metaphors We Live By.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
⁹ Odell, J. (2020). How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. New York: Melville House.
¹⁰ Bridle, J. (2019). New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso.

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Ada Popovic is a pattern-seeker trying to understand the world through design, writing and coding. Her work revolves around deep observation, making sense out of things and questioning all that is taken for granted. Passionate list-maker and a fan of dumplings.

During my bachelor's degree in graphic design I grew a lot as a person. I can say that the girl who started studying in 2016 has nothing in common with the one who is writing this. I can definitely affirm that I learned a lot and I enjoyed most of the time, but I always felt like something was missing. I saw that the commercial graphic design was not for me and that I enjoyed much more artistic and technological projects. That’s why at the end of my bachelor’s I took advantage of my last assignment to design a peculiar farewell. And that's how "The Day I Killed a Graphic Designer" was born.

The project revolves around a symbolic funeral that pretends to positively manifest my decision to not work as a graphic designer once my studies are finished. In this funeral I killed my graphic designer self during an online event with music and friends, deleting all the works produced during the duration of my studies. The images that were generated with the dead works were used to create the graphics of this project. Therefore, my last work is born from all the previous ones.

The social context was decisive both in the graphic decision making and in the choice of platforms to use in this experiment. The quarantine has forced us to try new creative avenues that we otherwise would not have tried before. Online platforms have been for many the way to make plans when there were no other alternatives and an escape route to a utopian and infantilized world in which there is no room for the unpleasant. The project also opens a debate on how the use of alternative methodologies based on technology and experimentation can help in generating new graphic resources.

The Day I Killed a Graphic Designer consists of a virtual event with all the graphics and streaming videos, a publication where the entire process is explained and a gift that was sent to all the virtual guests.

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Andrea (nddr3) is a 24-year-old visual artist focused on exploring the possibilities of technology as a creative tool. Her experimental projects are inspired by the imaginary of the Internet and the world around us. In her work she usually integrates innovative technologies, processes and languages through a critical and coherent dialogue.