Karolina Sobecka

Nephology 1: Cloud Maker attempts to construct knowledge of clouds through investigating how the clouds encounter the world around them.

Making a cloud is a little like making a wave in the ocean — a gesture that seems Sisyphian in its futility and its absurdity.  But if we consider the cloud as an object-for-itself, apart from its utility or its meaning for us humans, then the effort gains a different dimension. To make a cloud one has to understand it, and understand the forces that shape it. One has to ask oneself “what does the world has to be like for the cloud to exist?”

Constructing knowledge is, as Levi Bryant writes “like what takes place in building a house. Part of building a house will involve conceptual elements such as ideas found in engineering and architecture, part will involve social and political elements such as laws and cultural traditions in architecture, part will be real materials used such as the tools, the wood, nails, etc., and part the techniques or practices that construction workers have learned.” Nephologies similarly attempts to weave together conceptual, social, material and phenomenological threads through a cloud’s particular point of view on the world.

Materials: custom misting system, styrofoam, weather balloon, video projection, C-print