RUISDAEL CLOUDS
2020
Pencil on paper, watercolor, Digital color
The clouds in Jacob van Ruisdael’s landscape paintings appear both massively imposing and ephemerally vaporous. Clouds loom over us today as a metaphor for a vast apparatus of power thirsty servers that can never be turned off. A man-made climate system with its own tidal movements. Data ‘packages’ break apart and reassemble briefly as images and text on our screens but they “live” within the vast northern data center archipelago where the climate cuts down on the cost of cooling the machines. Echoes of original images serve as the raw materials of this film, emerging from the cloud, processed by hand and returned to the cloud.
PRESS