LISTENING TO THE SKY: Cumulus

figures of the elusive politics of the sky

Claudia Lomoschitz & Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir

This text originates from the research on the audio-visual performance CUMULUS. We invite you to watch today’s choreographies of the sky while listening to our audio file. Maybe you’d like to go for a walk and have a look at the presented scenarios. If you like, spot some clouds through a small mirror, to turn your world upside down. Clouds shape our daily life, they carry rain, snow, hail, even Sahara sand. They are shading our world, silently crossing borders, speaking in thunder and lightning. CUMULUS like to create moments of bonding with the surrounding environment that is our shared cohabitation. Clouds glide often unnoticed and inaudible through the sky, piling up to massive greyish structures that pour down in piercing rain, accompanied by ice cold wind and electrifying lightning.

cloud 

becomes a 

mountain

becomes a 

cloud

 

Warm air rises, piles up, begins to condense, solidifies in drops, rising higher and higher, starting to cool, freeze — till heavy weight pulls them down, colliding with charged particles, building up electric tension, thunder discharging in zigzags of light, these diabolic blasts of fate, hotter than the sun’s heat. Immediate physical response to the force of lightning runs down the spine in cold shivers and electrifying goosebumps. 

 

Did you ever think about the air as matter? Your breath sculpting the air, a shared resource. I breathe the air you breathe – 11.000 liters of air a day 

 

Paying attention to environmental conditions and asking the question of who can live breathable lives, or who has access to fresh air, has been the subject of works and writings of contemporary feminist philosophers. French philosopher Luce Irigaray stated with her book in 1983, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, that the air has been ‘forgotten’ and neglected for a long time in male dominated western thought, as air, with its unruly fluxes is not a simple solid matter and remains rather ungraspable and uncontrollable. Feminist philosopher, Magdalena Górska, asks in her essay ‘Feminist politics of breathing’ if we can use breathing as a force of social justice? Can we use breathing as a practice of acknowledging our cohabitation and role in the ecosystem? After all, it’s not only us breathing on this planet. Breathing is shared across all life forms, animals, over — and under-water beings, plants, soil and elements. When we breathe in, we merge with our surroundings, we gather air — the sky within us, the atmosphere deep in our lungs. The sky moves within our body and our breath turns into a cloud. 

 

We want to share one of our childhood practices — a game with a mirror at hand, where one directs the mirror up towards the sky, shifting and destabilizing the perspective, turning the world upside down. Perhaps for a moment, you can walk on the clouds. Can you spot a cloud in the mirror? Look at its shape, curves and densities. Pick one cloud as a companion, watch how it transforms.

 

The climate’s culmination and manifestation in the shapes of clouds is a sensitive and complex feedback system under the threat of a warming climate. As the world warms, cloud cover will change across the globe and these changes will probably speed up global warming even more. Recently researchers say, the warming earth may lead to a considerable loss of clouds in the near future. The vanishing of clouds will result in less shadow, rain, snow and ice, leading to shortages in drinking-water. However, the non-linearity of clouds adds an immense uncertainty to global climate models, as clouds remain unpredictable in movement, temperature, size, chemical composition and temporality. 

 

Certain clouds can be threatening and even lethal. Toxic — human made clouds such as herbicides are spread over lands of crops and livelihoods. States deploy teargas against uprisings, to disperse protests against environmental pollution. Toxic clouds colonize the air we breathe. Blackish vapor in the air. Emissions, teargas, glyphosate, chemical weapons. It becomes clearer and clearer that today’s clouds are both environmental and political. It is unfortunate that human progress and knowledge has taken shape in the form of blackish vapor of the 19th century industrial revolution, deadly atomic clouds of the atomic age and currently the digital cloud. All these phenomena point towards the obscure relation to the environment that humans have put themselves in. The need to challenge our understanding of being in this world becomes more apparent with current climate changes. 

 

cloud 

becomes a 

computer 

becomes a 

cloud 

 

Today’s clouds are not only atmospheric, but also a digital phenomenon. It’s not a coincidence that the computational cloud is named after the weather phenomena, as its origin is tightly entangled with the weather. The development of the first computers in the 1940s was driven with two purposes in mind; firstly, to mathematically simulate and predict the weather and control it and secondly to simulate and calculate the movement of atomic fallout. The military interest in controlling the weather continued to motivate the development of the most powerful computers of today, which are used to simulate atomic bombs. They run on extremely large servers that are owned by private companies holding the wellbeing of the world in their hands. The air thickens as computation overgrows the atmosphere, digital clouds seem ungraspable and opaque, invisibilizing power relations. Data centers are part of the extractive industries and of the biggest climate offenders. Storms of digital clouds are taking us in. 

 

Within the book ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ written by an unknown monk in the 13th century, clouds are deployed as reminders that we cannot control everything, showing our human limitations and humbleness towards the sky. Within the information age we are distracting from our connection with the surrounding, our humbleness towards the environment, our feelings, senses and movement. The air has for the longest time been taking care of us. It is time to ask the question:

How can we take care of the air and its inhabitants? How can we listen to their needs?

 

We have been turning the world upside down, flying dangerously high. Perhaps the wish to come closer to the sky, ends with the realization that coming closer to the sky through our lived-out imagination, is far less polluting. We could become members of the Cloud Appreciation Society, founded by cloud enthusiast Gavin Pretor-Pinney, and direct our gaze more often towards the open sky. Acknowledging our coexistence and looking up into the sky can be a start of changing the way we relate to our surroundings. 

 

‘Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Heavenly and bright. The day pours out space, a light red roominess, bright and fresh. Bright and soft. Bright and fresh. Sparkling and wet. Clamour and tint.’ 

Lisa Robertson (2001), The Weather, Monday, New Star Books, Vancouver