Photography and the Cloud

The Rencontres d’Arles presents “Photography & the Cloud,” an exhibition curated by Kathrin Schönegg featuring historical and contemporary photographs of clouds. The show engages the double of “cloud” as the meteorological phenomenon and the digital network on which much archival, surveillance, satellite, and personal documentation is stored. But the digital cloud itself is a means by which artificial intelligence “learns” and forms; incorporating the effects of cloud computing upon climate change and geopolitics, the exhibition draws an analogy between the resonance of this technology now, in early twenty-first century artistic conceptions, and the resonance of clouds as meteorological phenomena in early twentieth-century artistic conceptions, with the beginnings of abstraction and artistic photography.