When transcribed into the electronic domain of Artificial Intelligence, reality continually reconfigures itself beyond recognition. What was once naively perceived as a forensically established testimonial document—an evidence of the real—is now melting down before our eyes, becoming an incomprehensible morphogenetic entity: a paranoid machine, a hyperobject. This process of contemporary technological irradiation initiates a chain reaction of uncontrollable symbolic mutations that uncannily resembles another process that marks a critical point in the unfolding of modernity: the emergence of nuclear energy—viewed both as an apparent threat and an assumed opportunity.
THE CLOUD is composed of divergent vectors of human and non-human agency, biography and history, the factual and the fictional. It is both an investigation into the toxic cloud that the broken reactor at Chernobyl spewed into the air, and an investigation into data residing in ‘The Cloud’ that fuels Artificial Intelligence. What is the singularity of the human body at this improbable yet inevitable convergence point between two clouds? Where do we locate the body’s inherent fragility and its posthuman resilience? Where lies the malignant potential for its inevitable deterioration, and where is the promise of its post-apocalyptic redemption?