Cloud Mapping Project (Cloud Room)

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Cloud Mapping Project is a real-time interactive animation installation and soundscape about the cloud, its significance and history in science and computing, as an enduring subject in art and music, to its unforeseen consequences as a tool for surveillance.

Is the trade-off of having technology at our fingertips worth its ability to directly influence and contribute to the growing obsolescence of individual privacy along with increasing our vulnerability due to the inherent problem of one’s cloud not being managed by oneself and the potential of one’s cloud data falling into the wrong hands?

What kind of communication approach do you use?

3D cloud images are downloaded via Google Earth or open source applications in real-time, located by x, y, z latitude and longitude coordinates. Cloud structures form at different altitudes, positions in the sky, so this is an aesthetic as well as a scientific and mapping decision. Each of the four walls simulate the earth’s globe in 3D by continually posting surveillance –like cloud images from a specific direction/location (North, South, East and West) as day turns into night around the world. It will incorporate an atmospheric soundscape and possibly use specialized eye glasses incorporating Tobii eye tracking or other technologies enabling viewers to manipulate cloud images with their eyes.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

I'm trying to raise awareness before we lose our privacy rights entirely.

The addictive use of ubiquitous and cloud computing to instantaneously share and permanently archive (there is no undelete) personal information is making personal experience and privacy obsolete. People turn to social media like Facebook and Instagram as virtual friends to immediately post their most intimate thoughts and details about their lives including medical histories, political views and financial profiles.

The bigger question is this good and what are the long term effects on us as individuals and as a society?

Will we lose our ability to choose, or even notice it is gone when the ubiquitous interface becomes so subtle that we are continuously targeted with exactly what we need, want and like at all times?

In addition to loss of personal choice, how will this affect our ability to reason, reflect and see things objectively if our attention is constantly being diverted away from what is actually happing?

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

In "The Move Toward Computing that Reads Your Mind", Molly Wood talks to Robert Scoble, co-author of "the Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy" who says “If you give an app access to your e-mail so it has your travel itinerary, for example, it can alert you when there is a problem with a flight, show you alternate flights and let you tap one or two time to rebook- especially if the credit card information is stored in the app.”

The problem is that while an application is providing a useful service for us it is also simultaneously gathering personal data that may be used in ways we would not authorize.

Molly continues: "Certainly in the future, phones will most likely be talking to wearable’s that are monitoring your movements, as well as things like your thermostats and even your cars. As the signals grow louder and more frequent, the context becomes more refined and accurate. Location is the most powerful element of contextual tech, from what I can tell. But it’s also the element that makes me concerned about my privacy. When an app is already reading your calendar, reading your email, learning where you live and work, where you’re traveling, what you are interested in, is there anything it doesn’t know?"

What I learned is that some people get it that loss of privacy is a big issue and others are so seduced by technology that they don't care. Hopefully we will be able to meet somewhere in the middle and maintain aspects of both.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

I think everyone can relate to this project. Everyone uses Google Maps, cell phone and social media applications and deals with crappy weather and also enjoys a beautiful sunset and great weather . It is how we communicate every day from the mundane to the sublime and that is what I am addressing here.

If the sky is ethereal would it still be conceived as such without our personal observation and interpretation of it such as achieved by artists of the past? If not could the metaphor of the unanchored sky located only by its satellite address, it’s x, y, z position be a symbol for something quite different, that its once bucolic god-like symbolism is obsolete because both our surveillable whereabouts and cloud data can be observed and targeted by anyone, anytime, for any purpose.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Preferably I would like to realize my work in a gallery setting utilizing a semi-closed or closed room with four wall surfaces to project images onto and audio equipment to play sound (the better audio equipment the better and multiple speakers if available). However I can adapt the project for an available site specific space and alternatively can present related work in the form of digital prints instead or separate animations on multiple LCD displays.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

Cloud Mapping Project is a synthesis of Stieglitz, Constable and Debussy’s artistic research and interpretation of cloud phenomena updated with the tools of the 21st century.

It includes a 3D 360 degree binaural soundscape incorporating field recordings of weather, almost live NASA satellite cloud coverage, digital photography and animation, creation of an immersive environment simulating the earth’s globe with images projected simultaneously onto all four walls mapped by x, y, z geographic location and enhanced interactivity for individual experience (possibly incorporating Tobii eye tracking glasses, Google Glass or cell phones applications), enabling viewers to manipulate cloud images with their eyes.