a collaborative work with Yuguang Zhang
The Bureau of Cloud Management (BCM) is a fictional bureau that collects, stores, and manages clouds floating into its designated monitoring area through human and generative AI's co-creating patterns. BCM Observation Note Viewing Portal:
https://clouds.management/
for the best experience, please visit via desktop using the Chrome browser
Production Credits
Creator and Director : Tong Wu & Yuguang Zhang
Machine Learning Artist: Yuguang Zhang
Visual & Interaction Artist : Tong Wu
Work Type :
Simulated Environment, web-based & interactive installation
| The Concept Behind
In an era when the “cloud'' is interpreted as the core concept of the global-scaled network of computing systems backing and connecting all the digital interfaces we interact with daily, it is the representation of advance-ness - faster speed, broader access, higher efficiency, and stronger connection. In it, we undoubtfully see a future that’s more rigorous, efficient, rational, and logical. While the world enjoys the adrenaline brought by technical revolution, feelings of fatigue and languishing are also widely experienced as we are trying to catch up with the technology adaptation and overloaded information.
Are we closer to or further away from being free? Driven by the thought, the artist duo traces back to the original cloud - and its characteristics that are associated with our primitive thinking of and connection with the world.
Perhaps every human being had a moment of looking up to the clouds - those afternoons of laying on the lawn and simply observing the fluffy, cotton-like clouds slowly floating by, constantly changing shapes. These moments draw the initial picture of the dreams of every one of us. Building upon countless gazes and primitive human imagination across time and space, clouds constitute the broadest interconnection of the world while embodying an ultimate form of unrestricted freedom.
Adapted from the short novel "The Submarine at Night" by novelist Chuncheng Chen, and brrowing a bureaucratic structure and modern system interface aesthetics to reconstruct the brisk and day-dreaming experience of observing clouds, the Bureau of Cloud Management is the imaginary space the duo created as they wonder, in what form could we, the finite species, be closer to the infinite freedom.
The INDEX 2022 version of the project is a web-based experience that presents the online portal of BCM, where participants participate as a BCM junior cloud observer and get to document and archive the passing-by clouds, which are simulated based on text materials collected from Braga and generated by a customized Machine Learning pipelines.