Cloud Apparatus – Experimental Cloud Ecologies (2019-ongoing)
Cubification – Is it possible to form a cloud—say, as a cube? For me, this was never achievable, echoing long cultural narratives about attempts to tame winds, draw and defend borders in the air, seed or harvest clouds, or manipulate weather at scale—while knowing that, in the medium of air, no one can ever remain isolated. Instead, the attempt produced something else: a set of adaptive workshops and an apparatus for opening playful, speculative spaces for engaging with air as an active, mostly invisible matter. Clouds here are not fixed shapes but dynamic actors—revealing air’s complexity, turbulence, and microbial liveliness far beyond what we usually perceive.
Contingency – Clouds hold contingency at their core: they unfold in ways that could always have been otherwise. Their activity, turbulence, and particulate or microbial load cannot be fully predicted—only encountered as shifting constellations of matter, data, and collision. Contingency marks the threshold between weather event and forecast, between what can be measured and what escapes our grasp. In the Cloud Apparatus, this openness becomes tangible as clouds tip, dissolve, thicken, or drift—mirroring a world that is never fully planable and asking us to navigate possibility and fragility at once.
Participation - Working with clouds means working through processes rather than outcomes. The Cloud Apparatus enables participatory, hands-on engagements in which vapour becomes a medium for form-giving, resonance-making, and speculative experimentation. Participants explore coexistence, production, distribution, and atmospheric narratives by situating themselves within the cloud’s behaviour. These interactions enact new spatial logics and unlock tacit knowledge—especially where risks, possibilities, and atmospheric residues resist verbalisation.
Clouds have long oscillated between classification and resistance: from Lamarck and Howard’s taxonomies, the atmospheric ambiguities sought by Constable and Friedrich, to the praise bestowed upon the language of clouds by Goethe. The modern International Cloud Atlas now even includes anthropogenic cloud types. Today, clouds appear not only as meteorological bodies but also as computational »clouds,« infrastructures of storage, perception, and inequality. Thinkers such as Sloterdijk, Latour, and Vogl highlight airspace as conquered, critical, and in need of new cognitive, embodied and phenomenological techniques. Artistic precedents—from Duchamp's Air de Paris to Manzoni's Corpo d'Aria—frame air as material. In parallel, cloud chambers have shaped science, from Wilson's detection of ionizing radiation to Schäfer’s climate-engineering reflections. Within this lineage, the Cloud Apparatus—commissioned by the Designmuseum Denmark in 2018—connects cloud morphology with a tightly controlled AI, questioning how language is produced and asking whether clouds, as forms of natural intelligence (NI), might unsettle our habitual modes of reasoning.
References
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Descartes, René, Les Météores, Discours de la méthode. Leyde (1637): 115–294.
Howard, Luke. Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, (2011). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139096966.
Schaefer, Vincent J. “Continuous Cloud Chamber for Studying Small Particles in the Atmosphere.” Industrial & Engineering Chemistry 44, no. 6 (1952): 1381–83. https://doi.org/10.1021/ie50510a051.
Winkler, Clemens. “Matters of Communication - Formen Und Materialitäten Gestalteter Kommunikation,” edited by Sabine Foraita, Bianca Herlo, and Axel Vogelsang (transcript Verlag, 2022), 206-12. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839451182-022.