THE GATHERING CLOUD
J R Carpenter
Winner of the New Media Writing Prize 2016
Editor's Pick for the Saboteur Awards 2017
The Gathering Cloud aims to address the environmental impact of so-called 'cloud' storage by calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not. Fragments of text from Luke Howard's classic Essay on the Modifications of Clouds (1803) and other more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day.
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A small print iteration of The Gathering Cloud shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.

A print book based on The Gathering Cloud, featuring a foreword by Jussi Parikka and an afterword by Lisa Robertson, was published by Uniformbooks in May 2017. PURCHASE ONLINE

The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016. Many thanks to the curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell. Portions of this text were first performed during the South West Poetry Tour, 1-8 August 2016. Thanks and curses to Annabel Banks for suggesting the hendecasyllabic constraint. Thanks to Michael Saunby, and folks at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office for discussions on code and the weather. Thanks to everyone at if:book, New Media Writing Prize 2016, and Saboteur Awards 2017.


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