24 Apr Cloud Service
Batia Suter
The sky is the place that invites for contemplation. It stays quite the same, no matter when or where looked at. Nowadays the cloud turned into a metaphorical trope for an ever-present data space, which by up- and downloading creates another archive placed in the sky. Atlas, encyclopedia, grammar – these relations to the archive are exactly the structures Batia Suter uses as a template for her visual surveys, but in the same way here she confronts this new digital metaphor with a poetic, romantic view of the cloud. As in Parallel Encyclopedia and Radical Grammar, Cloud Atlas is a kaleidoscope of the relation of all visual phenomena circled around one blurred thematic circle. But with it’s thin, soft paper and light feeling, this time it appears more like a misty cumulus cloud than a bold image archive. This associative journey takes you through the dull and fluffy, to heavy rainy clouds and spheric dust, floating underwater plants and glimmering sand dunes, until you’ll find yourself counting sheep – thinking about this really deep sleep that takes you to cloudy dreamscapes again. It’s this kind of unexplainable associations that give you the feeling of having solved the puzzle in the order of things while looking at it. Apophenia is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections between unrelated things -in this case it’s a really satisfying tendency of our perception.