(c) Fragmentin, Your phone needs to cool down, 2019
In the months leading up to November 2020, a fateful point in time for world politics as Donald Trump stands for re-election, there will likely be less talk explicitly about the weather. The emotionally charged macro-political climate is unimaginable without today’s technological developments. Both the metaphor and the reality of the “cloud” are omnipresent in our daily lives. It is not only the place where data are stored but also – by cloud computing, cloud gaming, or cloud streaming – the place where the central functions of computational power and auto-learning artificial intelligence have migrated to. The cloud is not a storage folder – it is our super brain.
The exhibition Stormy Weather showcases artistic works that explore the metaphorical notion of the seemingly ephemeral cloud against the backdrop of its quite lasting effects in the real political world. The multilayered phenomenon of human-made clouds is dissected to enable one thing in the end: to pose questions, to reveal relationships, and to use artistic methods to evoke new forms of agency towards digital technologies. (Katharina Brandl and Claire Hoffmann)
