Cartographies of the Unseen

While clouds connect us, today not every cloud is made of air and mist. Some clouds are so dense and heavy, they no longer occupy the sky and instead rise up from the underground. In this talk I will present an alternative epistemology of human-made clouds, manifesting at various altitudes on a vertical axis.



The cloud-like infrastructure that ‘hosts’ our contemporary digital life is made of complex data centers, cables and offshore server farms. Such clouds also rely on climate conditions, mineral extraction, tides and oceanic geopolitics. Therefore, thinking about the cloud and the air it also breathes, is thinking about all kinds of human-made clouds and the space in between as a dense and complex set of relations. These infrastructures also enable a new era of entangled spatial logics, which render the geometries, politics and other surface-level categories that conceptualize space insufficient. Therefore, this in-progress study of vertical geography through human-made clouds will put forward other definitions of public space, open access and world-picturing using depth, altitude and invisibility as instruments for aesthetic inquiry into new frontiers of publicness.