Cloud Maintenance

Clemens Winkler / Tim Winter, 2024

Site-specific installation with performance
Water, electrical equipment, Argentine Claveles del Aire, steel strings, tape, thermal paper
Dragoner.02—Super Contemporary Arts Fest, Dragonerareal, Berlin, curated by Babette Werner, together with Yasmin Alt, Luis Bortt, Jan Herdlicka

Who is in control in the control room—humans, clouds, or the environment itself? What, if anything, can still be sustained or maintained?

As technological systems inherently experience breakdowns—revealing environmental entanglements we can only partially grasp—Cloud Maintenance makes a relational field of technology, climate, plants, dust, and clouds tangible. Hanging air plants (Claveles del Aire), originating from South America and now thriving under Europe’s warmer annual climate, register these shifts and prompt a central question: how do humans situate themselves within changing atmospheric conditions? Over the course of Dragoner 2.0, the installation unfolds as a temporary climate laboratory—concerned less with control than with attentiveness, position, and response. Moving between data clouds and the fog of not-knowing, the work asks whether meaningful action remains possible, and how intuition and the entanglement of bodily, emotional, and cognitive experience might guide responses within climatic—and thus living—environments that increasingly resist prediction.

KNOWLEDGE OF NOT-KNOWING

Clouds are formations of vaporized and frozen water and air. In the interplay of perception and imagination, they become a poetic language of the sky—while simultaneously obscuring clear sight. Climatologically and culturally, to be in or beneath clouds is to inhabit uncertainty. In a present shaped by rapid technological and climatic change, cognitive and bodily-sensory experiences increasingly condense into questions of imagination, dialogue, and control. As information and perception are more often reduced to explanatory models, metrics, and statistically meaningful patterns—particularly within digital interfaces and AI-driven systems—spaces for ambiguity, intuition, and non-knowledge are at risk of being displaced. Cloud Maintenance asks how the demand for knowledge about future climatic conditions can coexist with space for sensing, feeling, and situational response. How do we act within a fog of not-knowing? What role do intuition and the entanglement of bodily, emotional, and cognitive experience play in environments that resist prediction?

Rather than treating uncertainty as a deficit, the work foregrounds experiential forms of knowledge—what Ursula K. Le Guin describes as »carrier bag« knowledge: accumulated, embodied, and relational understandings of survival, adaptation, and movement within changing worlds.
Cloud Maintenance frames this approach as a form of witnessing: not as detached observation, but as situated presence—where sensing, recording, and responding become entangled practices within atmospheric conditions that resist prediction.

RECIPROCITY

Do we need to be both inside and outside the control room—or the climatic equation—to gain a coherent view? In a technologically driven reality, control is often assumed to be central. Yet the term itself may no longer suffice, as it relies on linear and largely manageable relations that no longer reflect planetary conditions. As our capacity to monitor environmental impacts increases, our bodily room for action narrows—constrained by heat extremes, water scarcity, soil loss, resource depletion, and related conflicts. Cloud Maintenance questions whether the control room remains a viable model, or whether it persists mainly as a fiction that translates uncertainty into numbers, algorithms, and procedures. Rather than positioning humans as sovereign operators, the work foregrounds reciprocity: an understanding of agency as distributed, reactive, and entangled within systems that cannot be fully overseen or governed.

DISCURSIVE MATERIALITY

What is already inscribed in the water, vapor, dust, plants, electronics, and bodies of the installation? Cloud Maintenance understands non-human actors not as background conditions, but as co-producers of the situation. Rather than proposing ecological utopias, the work practices staying with unstable, shifting relations whose outcomes remain provisional. How will we read the state of our own sensing in the future—through technologies that measure largely human-defined parameters, through biological indicators such as air plants and their changing habitats, or through bodily experience in a room heated to 35–40°C? What if scientific understanding were to take bodies—human and non-human, living and non-living—more seriously as part of the equation? So-called “pure” data already reflect specific worldviews and systems of order. By contrast, the printed prompts produced in the installation pass through bodily conditions and atmospheric states. More than measurements alone, they articulate a linkage between technical observation and embodied sensing.

CONTINGENCY & IMPROVISATION

Contingency emerges through making: from open beginnings and open continuations, from repetition and the understanding that formation happens in the doing. Not-knowing is not a deficit here, but a form of knowledge in itself. Bodies in the space act as crystallization points—initiating moments of observation and transformation that unfold as a multisensory, situational inquiry. What proprioceptive, visual, respiratory, thermal, and acoustic traces arise when perception extends beyond the control room into both the external and internal worlds of the observer? And how do these traces, in turn, alter the space in which they appear? To walk on clouds does not mean to master them. It describes a mode of movement within uncertainty. Cloud Maintenance offers no solutions. Instead, it proposes an attitude: attentiveness, hesitation, adaptation—and a willingness to orient oneself within conditions that cannot be fully known or controlled.