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just in space. For these reasons,
Cloud Atlas
offers one alternative for
how to think about cloud culture that does not simply require a choice
between the cloud of knowing and of unknowing.
This topic concludes by taking up artistic manifestations of these ideas
in cloud culture, one of whose icons is René Magritte's
The Empire of
Light
, a painting that features the bright blue of a daytime sky illed with
puffy white clouds that oversee a row of houses in nighttime darkness.
Something is awry in the clouds and on the ground. Taking a different
perspective is a contemporary work, Tomás Saraceno's remarkable installa-
tion
Cloud City
, an assemblage of large, interconnected modules built with
transparent and relective materials that occupied the roof garden of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art for six months in 2012. We call on Magritte
to question the seeming harmony of cloud networks and on Saraceno to
see ourselves in the relecting glass of his cloud. Where are we in cloud
computing? Some artists are beginning to address this issue directly by
producing work about cloud computing. For that we consider Tamiko
Thiel, whose installation
Clouding Green
depicts differently colored clouds
that hover over eight major Silicon Valley cloud-computing providers to
describe their environmental record. These surreal representations draw
from and add aesthetic power to a 2012 Greenpeace environmental assess-
ment, “How Clean Is Your Cloud?”
To the Cloud
recognizes that it is time to move beyond technical descrip-
tions of cloud computing by producing a critical assessment. To begin
the process, the next chapter explores the origins of cloud computing in
visions of the computer utility. It proceeds to examine the principles that
distinguish cloud computing, describes what cloud computing actually
does, and maps the state of the cloud-computing industry.
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