Have one's head in the clouds: the elusive theocracy of distributed data

In Italian Mannerism and Baroque painting tradition, the depiction of clouds was having a precise reference to theological meanings. Similarly, cloud computing is a metaphorical term for hosted services on Internet, which is inspired by the imaginative unreachability of clouds in the sky. By examining images of clouds in fine art painting, we would like to emphasize how different ways of theological knowledge has been conceived, imagined and represented, crossing over into fields of history, religion and philosophy, and how that visual heritage reached us nowadays. Through an artistic and historical journey we would like to stress out the idea of historical imagination in the redefinition of concepts and terms, pointing out to the strategies of storytelling in the contemporary society. We would provide for some example of masterpiece fine art painting in parallel with contemporary communication strategy in the definition of the term “cloud” and its misleading connotation of immaterial substance. We would underline the similarities and the differences in the use of the term cloud, within history and how it was and it is still used in order to hide political and communicational strategies.