The 1st International Symposium "Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art" seeks to deepen this notion of expanded ecologies by examining current transdisciplinary artistic, cultural and curatorial practices that provide different ways to understand, contest and interrogate our relation to the earth through discursive, visual and sensual strategies and methodologies, experimenting beyond disciplinary confinements and generating new subjectivities, new posthuman ethics and novel posthuman politics.

Cloud Ecologies: Weather, Pollution, Time and Data

This paper considers the mutating ecologies of the cloud as it slips between references to the weather, pollution, time and data.

Craigie Horsfield’s tapestries Above the Road East toward Taibique, El Hierro, 15 minutes, 2008, and 16 minutes 25 seconds, February 2002, re-present two woven images of clouds taken from film stills. El Hierro is the smallest and most Western of the Canary Islands and sits at what was once known as the “edge of the world” between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Clouds drift. From the old world frontiers of El Hierro to the new frontiers of the technosphere, reaching out into ‘open’ space is shown to be a powerful imaginary that seeks to obscure how “offensives are connected back to the source after a certain processing time”(Sloterdijk, 2014, 11). This “processing time” is now being coded in more explicitly geological terms as a consequence of theories of the Anthropocene. The Earth and the atmosphere have a memory. Behind the informatic clouds accessed at the touch of a screen lies a world of material traces, social and environmental consequences and slow violence, from networks of cables to server farms, orbiting satellites, rare earth mineral mining, factory assembly lines and mountains of toxic e-waste. The cloud’s ecology mutates becoming natural and artificial, located and dispersed, material and immaterial.