photo: Kim Jasper, 2016.
Cloud Harvest is an installation consisting of a smartphone which has been deconstructed, its materials sorted based on their chemical composition and housed within a cloud chamber. Inside, an ultrasonic fog machine atomises water to create a cloud inside a mirrored cube. This work reflects on the materiality of cloud computing, demystifying “the cloud” by stretching the term to its limits.
“The cloud” is a spectre, hauntingly present yet intangible. It knows you intimately: your memories, work, shopping habits, medical records, bank account details. It knows your likes, your friends, where you are and where you’ve been, the pace of the strides you took along the way. Though this friendly ghost is at hand wherever and wherever, it is paradoxically absent, dispersed between servers and interfaces, neither here nor there, yet everywhere. Wireless devices enable a seemingly ubiquitous yet limited view of the vaporous leviathan. Cloud Harvest seeks to locate the cloud in the materials it is channelled through by breaking down a smartphone to its elemental composition and analysing the materials of the gadgetry used to tap into atomised data.
