Cloud of Unknowing

The visitor enters a dark room. A luminous screen floating in the middle of the room prevents the eyes from getting used to the darkness. Below the luminous surface are two transparent air mattresses that reflect the light of the projection. The visitor lies on the inflated plastic mattresses, which immediately adapt themselves to the body. Fans whir in every corner of the room and create a slight draft over the mattresses. On the projection surface, enlarged scans of server parts pass, overlap and flow into each other in fragments. The visitor hears two soundtracks from different directions – words entangle as s/he tries to make sense of the description:

The basic shape is a sort of circle with other round eruptions along it, different sizes and not uniform, it is definitively angular, black, not white, blurred edges, their volumes are difficult to grasp because we always have the view from below, it leads us into immaterial thinking, atmospheres become something tangible, varied forms, basically organic, rather amorphous, I have never seen a square, it can be very long and thin, it has no real material form, it is above all light in conjunction with electricity, or rather compressed and roundish, it can point vertically and horizontally, three-dimensionally extended in all directions, in itself it actually has no color, it usually appears between white and black, this system is everywhere, I do not see it, an all-saving treasure, something ephemeral, somehow there, but never fixed and fixed, but constantly changing, a temporary structure, a floating marshmallow, a bed of desires and fears, I do not really know what it really is, imperceptible.

At some point, the visitor releases him/herself from the inflated plastic sheets and leaves the room again.

The dual meaning of “cloud/Wolke” appears at the beginning of the audio-visual piece Cloud of Unknowing. “What does a cloud look like?” or “wie sieht eine Wolke aus?” – these questions were posed twice to around twenty people. Their answers reflected both the meteorological phenomenon as well as the data-cloud phenomenon. The resulting two texts were recorded onto two audio tracks. The installation is constructed as a loop so that the tracks of different lengths overlap in a new way each time, producing different phrase combinations. The ambiguous question does not earn points in their answer. The terms cloud and Wolke are not to be heard in the piece and the audience is left in the dark.