Songs of the Sky

„For centuries, we’ve looked to the sky to divine the future. Today, we look to the Cloud.” (James Bridle) As early as 1922, the famous American photographer Alfred Stieglitz turned his camera to the sky for the first time “to find out what [he] had learned in 40 years about photography.” His series of cloud pictures, which he initially called Songs of the Sky before they became famous as Equivalents, paved the way to abstraction for a medium that had been associated with the depiction of reality. A century later, the thematic exhibition Songs of the Sky . Photography & the Cloud uses the original title to discuss the current change in photography due to digitalization and its consequences. Thinking about photography today entails a consideration of the infrastructures that form and organize networks. Regardless of whether images are generated by surveillance cameras or satellites, or consist of digitized archival material or personal vacation photographs on our smartphones and laptops, all photographs are saved on the cloud operated by artificial intelligence.