Thinking Like a Cloud

Karolina Sobecka (US & PO)

The Cloud Collector is a device for Thinking Like a Cloud. It is sent into the atmosphere attached to a weather balloon. Clouds condense on its mesh wings and flow into a sample container. These cloud samples are analysed for microorganisms and ingested by experimental volunteers. By combining the cloud microbiome with their own, the volunteers become part cloud and keep a cloud journal reporting their transformation. Thinking Like a Cloud is a scheme to expand human consciousness and enable systems thinking.

The objective of Thinking Like a Cloud was developed after Aldo Leopold’s land ethics motto ‘thinking like a mountain’. It describes an ability to appreciate the interconnectedness of things over space and time. The clouds have long served myth-makers, philosophers and scientists, as the face and the boundary markers of the forces shaping our world. Today their ephemerality and complexity embodies the essence of dynamic interconnected systems. In Thinking Like a Cloud, clouds are ingested by humans.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Karolina Sobecka is an artist, designer and director. Her artwork often engages public space and explores the way we interact with the world we create and imagine. Her recent projects focus on climate engineering as a way of investigating the values that drive technological innovation, and shape the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature.