Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics

Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics via a collection of essays reflects upon the relationship between the small and the very large. Offering varied perspectives and conceptual approaches, this carefully curated collection analyzes the complexity of contemporary society specific to aesthetic endeavors which use scientific and digital frameworks as a means of relevant expression and critical examination. This volume inspired by aesthetic, intellectual paradigms, and scientific interpretations of the words ‘cloud’ and ‘molecular’ presents conceptualizations which are not solely related and restricted to scientific and aesthetic endeavors but also to a socio-political understanding of reality and its visual representation.

The desire of being dissolved—or the desire of transcendence—is the focus of this essay which, by analyzing the concepts of both cloud and contemporary digital media, explores the dramatic tensions of the life and death in the digital archive. The essay questions the corporate and state enforced processes that shape and determine the condition of digital existence, as well as the participation of the individual in these mediated re-presentations of one’s life, which create a fracture between the clouded-human and the grounded-human.

This essay explores the manifestation of an individual’s experience of art, in real-time, as a visual and evolving dialogue captured through a stream of emotive data. Its starting point is the preoccupation contemporary cultural organizations and funding bodies have with evaluating the experience of art through disconnected techniques, represented as static imagery. As such, it challenges the hegemony of the eye and the illusion of certainty that the image produces, and instead requires a temporal, polysensory engagement with fleeting moments of ‘insubstantial uncertainty.’

Our modern media of photography, telegraphy, telephony, radio, cinema, television, and video were once domains of disembodiment and spectral appearance; whether characterized as incorporeal voices and sounds, or as ethereal images or actions communicated by their agents from a distance, they have been intuited from their origins and theorized throughout their history to be “haunted media.” Contemporary digital technologies and, notably, their fabrication of social media, however, appear to have dispelled such phantoms, both at the microscopic level of code and in the macroscopic realm of interactivity across the web. While there may be piracy, crime, and subterfuge, these appear to be due only to anachronistic loopholes or glitches in security protocols that are constantly being monitored and corrected or closed down: in principle, and in its ultimate form, there are no hiding places on the web, because there can be no dark corners and no ‘Unconscious’ behind its affluent heterogeneity. Perhaps that ultimate form of pervasive availability and accessibility is configured in the superabundant connectivity of the cloud. While the political economy of the cloud—in particular, its configuration of web capitalism—has been subject to critique in the past few years, this essay presents a view onto the cloud from the haunted perspective of modern media. It speculates on how the cloud might darken, and what demonology might be written for it, as its communal spaces are inundated by paranormal pollutants and pathogens, erupting in paranoia, contagion, and pandemic possession.

Taking turbulence as both a conceptual driver and organizational strategy, this paper examines the coming together of particular ideas, materials, and processes in a collection of recent drawings, installations, and performative works. These projects were developed through an experimental practice of ‘atmospheric-making,’ which involves reciprocal capacities of affecting and being affected by atmospheres. Within this two-way dynamic between the particular and the atmospheric, new qualities emerge from the interplay between particles and systems.

This paper seeks to consider the topography of the artist’s studio in relation to spatial conceptions of the cloud as an amorphous, virtual entity that exists everywhere and yet is nowhere in particular. Contemporary understandings of the studio are no longer strictly defined by physical dimensions or geographic specificity. Instead, recent incarnations of the studio can operate with “seemingly no disciplinary or spatial boundaries whatsoever.” [1]

Fathom is a sound installation by Jane Grant and John Matthias that was commissioned by the River Tamar Project and premiered at the Factory Cooperage Building in Royal William Yard, Plymouth, UK in September 2013. Visitors entering the installation were able to hear live and edited sound recorded underwater in Plymouth Sound, a large estuarine body of water from which the Plym, Tamar, and Hamaoze Rivers flow into the sea. They were also able to climb out of the underwater sonic environment, above the Fathom, to hear live acoustic sound relayed by microphones above the water. In this paper we will explore some of the poetics of the work, particularly regarding the relationship of the surface to the planet and the moon, the relationship of a surface to a body of water, what it is to break through that surface, and how waves of sound reflect and cancel. We will also consider the idea of the wave and the concept of phaseand how the manipulation of these enabled the work to be constructed.

Telepathy is emerging as a significant paradigm of artistic practice at the interface of art and science, with telepathy operating in transferences of media, tele-technologies, and ‘techlepathies,’ as well as in social and psychological aspects of collaboration and interaction. Design researcher Usman Haque and artists Gianni Motti and Marina Abramović work with telepathic and telekinetic possibilities that arise at this intersection of art and science, as does artist, theorist, and cognitive scientist Warren Neidich. This paper will explore the telepathy of Motti, Abramović, and Haque through their artistic work with brain synchronicity and electroencephalogram (EEG) interaction, telemetrics, crowd empathy, media clouds, electromagnetism, and quantum physics. Their work is further understood through the prism of current philosophical theories, especially speculative aesthetics that engage the telepathy and telekinesis of quantum physics, as well as Marxist ‘Operaist’ or ‘workerist’ theories of immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism that engage with the ‘action at a distance’ concept of social theory. Further, speculative and cognitive materialisms are shown to intersect, perhaps paradoxically, through engagement with the aesthetics of telepathic and telekinetic immateriality. The aesthetics of this art and theory converge at the telepathy of quantum neurodynamics, which is aligned with, and yet displaces, cognitive intuition in Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetics.

At the Istanbul biennial in 2011, Israeli artist Dani Gal’s Historical Records Archive (2005 – present) installation blew our minds. Here was a collection of real LP albums of significant twentieth century historical events, speeches, and political debates. But it was also an archive in which the actual records were deliberately absent, foregrounding the planar cover art as information about something elusive and leaving visitors with the speculative task of imagining how they might or could sound. [1] But in its own uncanny, quantum way, it echoed our work in Classical Gas project (2011 – present) in its transformation of classical album covers from the “easy listening” tradition of popular music into canonical texts from the history of ideas. What follows, then, is a series of probes that explore a form of molecular semiotics that we perform to suggest uncanny epiphanies that can occur when, for instance, a Shirley Bassey album becomes An Ethics of Sexual Difference by Luce Irigaray [2] or Music in the Morgan Manner segues into a fighting title by Roseanne Allucquere Stone. [3] Drawing on Marcel Duchamp’s readymade concept of infra-mince, or infrathin, as well as Gregory Bateson’s informatic “difference that makes a difference,” our ongoing Classical Gasproject freeze-frames this poetic moment of transformation from one semiotic state to another. As in physics or digital vectors of information exchange, the fine and elusive epiphany of transformation is always in the eye of the beholder. Art isn’t necessarily about what you see, but what it prompts you to see.

The implications of cloud phenomena and molecular aesthetics conjure macro and micro perspectives that resonate with the author’s research into haptic interface aesthetics and open systems. Physics describes the world’s natural state as one of entropy, where clusters of order are the result of the ability of living organisms or machines to make decisions in order to create local zones of organization. The author’s a/r/tographic work in humanistic intelligence, through haptic interfaces or reconstructed sensas, has led to a consideration of materials in terms of non-static manifestations. This article discusses the potential of this shift in perspective to open new spaces for artists to work in and new vivacious materials to sculpt with. Nanotechnology enhances our capacity to sense molecular activity, enabling engagement with materials previously considered dormant and stable that are now perceptibly in motion; we will hear, touch, and feel them in new ways – our bodies will witness a renaissance of the sensual. Wearable prototypes are explored as aesthetic interpretations and expressions of data-flows. Viewing all things as ‘actants’ reframes design questions to ask: What are the flows and waves that emanate around ‘things’? How do ‘things’ connect with and disturb the fields of matter surrounding them?

While the creation of lifelike appearances has been an ever-recurring historical feature in art, contemporary artists who employ biotechnology are particularly ‘close to life,’ and the new discipline of synthetic biology is well-suited to upgrade art historical paradigms of ‘creation.’ In conjunction, the democratization of lab tools leads to their appropriation by tinkerers and tactical media activists who apply the potential of open-source culture from the digital age of media art to do-it-yourself (DIY) biology and biohacking. Hereby, the formerly distinct features of the technologization of the animate and the animation of the technological merge in an unprecedented way, both technically and metaphorically. This paper discusses media adequacy—the aesthetically and epistemologically convincing implementation of the instances of mediation of living entities or beings with regards to the corresponding appropriate materials and strategies—in the light of the trendy discipline of synthetic biology. This discipline aims at designing living systems from scratch, and is emerging at a time when DIY biology seems set to be the next pop-culture phenomenon. Art is increasingly linked to knowledge production and dissemination within a larger scope of what can be called an epistemological turn, in which cultural practitioners do not so much translate and transform what we know, but rather question how we know what we know.

This article considers the paradoxes of visualizing the networked image in the contexts of data mining and social media networks. In particular, it presents Grace Kingston’s project Here You Are as critically engaged with and participating in these data mining practices, along with the common social networking practices of check-ins and selfies, in order to emphasize social network users as bodies of data. This is situated within a larger context of global network surveillance and data extraction, which aim to visualize these highly visible, everyday activities as they are implicated in invisible circuits of data mining and control that extend well beyond the users’ self-perceptions and agency. As such, the project and the article aim to illuminate the noisy penumbra of the data clouds surrounding these practices in order to reveal this opaque circulation conducted in and through social networks. We present this paper as a dialogue, as this is intrinsic to its composition.

This essay begins with Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, a series of supper-club meals addressing specific ecological topics including oil spills and multispecies encounter. I read this work alongside histories of molecular gastronomy and evolving theories of the human microbiome to analyze how figuring and imaging science moves from the dinner plate through the digestive system. For Jeremijenko, molecular gastronomy allows for an interventionist environmentalism that may be scaled up to create new wetland environments to better ‘digest’ oil spills. Digestion becomes a way of figuring the landscape and encountering animals, plants, and environmental systems, with molecular gastronomy techniques providing metaphoric and literal frameworks for imagining how bodies and landscapes interrelate. Attention to the visual cultures of the very small often employs language that evokes the very large, with individual human microbiomes described as ‘islands’ and figured as ‘territory’ to be explored. Rather than taking a territorial or colonial approach to the human microbiome, I would suggest that the cloud and metaphors of atmospheric shift, drift, and blooming open up a field of action and intervention where plants and animals converge in our understanding of how our bodies cooperate with a changing population of bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

This essay describes a digital media artwork that utilizes computer vision and generative digital effects to capture the immaterial character of crowd dynamics in public spaces. The process allows for the emergence of a double-layered audiovisual impression of population movement through the city, and includes: (1) a series of short videos shot at various urban spaces and digitally manipulated in real time to register the flow of pedestrians, and (2) a gallery exhibition of the collective footage collated as an interactive movie strip. The outcome of an art and science residency, the artwork refashions surveillance media, video art, and painting by offering traces of pedestrians’ daily walking activities in public spaces, re-rendered artistically in real time. By doing so, it proposes a new idiom for the visualization of patterns of human movement in the digitally augmented city. In isolation, each movie offers a high level of transparent immediacy, positioning the audience at the center of the space, albeit hidden behind the camera’s window frame. At the gallery, however, the collective footage attains a high degree of ‘hypermediacy,’ simultaneously highlighting the hedonic character of the interactive medium itself while offering a critique of the surveillance practices that are increasingly common in contemporary society.

In the mid-1960s, an alcoholic, chain-smoking bellhop from Chicago found himself at the center of a psychic cyclone. Ted Serios could produce images on Polaroid film just by projecting his thoughts into the lens of the camera. Serios was an overnight sensation, and his unique abilities were the subject of worldwide attention. Famous prestidigitators, such as James Randi aka the Amazing Randi, endeavored to prove that Serios was—of course—a fake, and that the scientists who were studying Serios were gullible saps. The Amazing Randi even claimed to have produced ‘thoughtographs’ through simple stage tricks and misdirection, thus demonstrating that Serios was a charlatan. In fact, he accomplished no such thing. However, the popular press, tired of the hard-drinking Serios and his strange abilities, accepted the Amazing Randi’s claims and Serios quickly disappeared from public consciousness. Yet Serios continued to produce his puzzling, fantastical images under strictly controlled scientific conditions, and the fact remains that we have no ‘natural’ explanation for them—at least, no natural explanation that relies on a strictly materialist mode of explanation. To assist in the exploration of the post-material psychodynamics of Serios’s unsettling oeuvre, this paper calls upon a series of images to remediate the fractious geometry of Serios, his ‘thoughtography,’ and the ‘real.’ These images are found in Robert Fludd’s magnum opus of 1617, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atque Technica Historia (History of the Macrocosm), and offer a hermetically unsealed disquisition emerging from the very first image, The Great Darkness.

Augmentation of urban space generates mixed realities, producing hybrid spaces that emerge from ecologies of virtual and actual signs and entities. This essay presents a framework for different aspects of fiducial markers that have been used within a series of street games. This augmentation of cities reconciles repositories of data with the city that generated them by ‘actualizing’ the data in situ, often making the experience of the city more game-like. A fiducial marker, often an object located in space, visible to both machines and humans, tethers a cloud of data to its location, connecting flows of information and players. The street games explore multisensory feedback generated by the markers in a series of public artworks in Ogaki, Istanbul, and Adelaide that connect street art, formal abstraction, augmented reality, and game design. Seven different aspects of fiducial markers are identified in this discussion. These aspects are analyzed by applying four different models: Lévy’s flattening of the virtual/actual hierarchy, Galloway’s “gamic actions,” Bogost’s “unit operations,” and Harman’s “quadruple object.” This analysis is centered upon the ways in which machine and human factors play equal roles in the construction of meaning, and makes it possible to explore a framework for analyzing the ontologies that emerge in mixed realities, blending fiducial markers, digital entities, human players, and public space in clouds of data.

Neuroaesthetics represents a new field that is currently being evaluated for its scope and purpose by both clinicians and artists. There is significant debate regarding the actual definition of this field and its relationships not only with medicine and art, but also with the philosophy of culture and religion. This paper will explain the close relationship between neuroaesthetics and the activation and processing that occur in certain parts of the brain, which can be quantified by radiological methods. It will also describe the relationship between brain damage (resulting from, for example, stroke, migraine, and neurodegeneration) and visual art production.

This essay looks beyond the metaphor of ‘the cloud’ as simply a way of describing a mode of data storage. In fact, this is just one of many systems and activities that are encompassed by the metaphor. While the cloud might at first seem indicative of a loss of material presence, as important things are sucked into data storage, our argument insists on the cloud’s inextricability from both very concrete matters and from collapses inherent to the concrete. The essay explores various forms of such collapses, wherein the fallout throws up a cloud of ‘affective dust’ that offers access to future potential. A series of examples are employed to demonstrate how collapse might operate as a specific technique within creative practice. In particular, the focus is on Arakawa and Gin’s Bioscleave House, proposing that in its design, this environment attempts to incorporate a perpetual collapse that resituates domestic habitation within a cloud of affective dust.

This essay discusses the first phase of Assemblage, a project that challenges conventional forms of documentation by experimenting with hybrid digital and spatial publishing platforms to productively archive refuse generated by artists participating in the Underbelly Arts Lab 2013. The project initiates an emerging archival system that uses a participatory lab-based approach to address new modes of documenting, curating, and configuring modes of engagement by activating incidental data generated during the lab event. This approach opens up possibilities for a productive exchange with the participatory artistic process, rather than a static record of its outcomes. This essay outlines how the project experiments with open-narrative structures, multiple archival figures, and focused play by developing enabling constraints, called ‘The Rules of Assemblage.’ In practice, these rules function as an enactive index that both catalogs and assembles the discarded materials of artists participating in the laboratory.

I would like to start this essay by examining the moment in time when clouds inadvertently became metaphors for chaos. The intention is to compare and explore the cloud’s new context as a ubiquitous data archive and distribution process. By using the concept of ‘particles’ or ‘bits’ of data, playing on the metaphorical molecular cloud, this essay will use a theoretical argument to break down the distinctive boundaries between our bodies, the object-world, and clouds. The molecular cloud becomes a new atmospheric formation of rethinking data as a global, and seemingly immaterial, distribution of storage and retrieval; of breathing in and out.

This essay will explore the use of atomic force microscopy for uncovering lost tales and histories through subtle audience interaction. Its focus is a portfolio of data-driven work and ‘nanoart’ developed by the author and collaborators. The works described below include: A Mote it is…, ˈspɛktə/spectre, and Exposure. These projects explore the ubiquity of data streamed from an instrumentalized world and its totality potentialed as material for manifesting things that lie outside of normal frames of reference—things so far away, so close, so massive, so small, and so ad-infinitum.

The current understanding of the expanded image is based on visual experiences provided by information turbulence in contemporary convergent media. We are therefore challenged to rethink everything we have come to understand about visuality, including the very physics of light and the physiology of the human eye.

By its very nature, chemistry is a science of transformation; reactions begin with known materials and end with tangible products; yet, for chemists, it is often the non-isolable molecular species produced during this journey between stable endpoints that are particularly fascinating. These immaterial, unstable states can only be imagined through drawn or rendered molecular illustrations. My focus here is on how chemists map chemical instability onto the legible domain of molecular representations and the associated temporal aesthetics of such representations.

“Cloud” is the most appalling metaphor we have to describe the global network of integrated data: a portent of dread always on the way to disappearance. Let me tell you why.

The essay proposes that the aesthetic model of cloud as metaphor for online services should be reconsidered in the context of the experiential qualities of services and products that are connected to cloud services. Given that every online service requires a business model in order to sustain its presence and the services that are connected to it, the author considers how network-based experiences are better thought of as markets. In particular, this essay explores the role of artifacts that are connected to cloud services and exchange data within complex and invisible value systems.

The cloud is hard to pinpoint. In its very nature and in all its manifestations it is nebulous, continually shifting, changing, and evolving. Periodically obsessed over by the arts, the idea of the cloud has inspired works by well-known artists and musicians including Claude Debussy, John Constable, and Alfred Stieglitz.