A cloud is intangible, always present, but a seemingly unnoticeable aspect of everyday life. A cloud is simply there, a pillow in the sky that blankets all our lives. It’s a universal presence, visible to every person despite their individual power, geography, or sightline. In Jordan Peele’s 2022 blockbuster film Nope, the cloud is the antagonist. We refuse to say villain here because it’s almost as if the cloud operates independently from any of the humans acting below it. It is an imposing presence, its scope reaching seemingly beyond comprehension. The only way the cloud can be stopped is to capture its ineffable essence using analog photography. There is a metaphor here about the cloud that contours all of our lives today–about its knowledge, its incessant watchful gaze, and its capacity to reproduce our own reflections, sometimes distorted but always appealing to our subconscious desires, insecurities, and fears.

Behind the Cloud spotlights the work of nine artists whose video, software, photography, algorithms, sculpture, and social media function to criticize and disrupt the supposed neutrality of the cloud we so easily overlook or refuse to see at times. Included artists interrogate the realities of what sociologist Ruha Benjamin describes as the “The New Jim Code: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”¹ In our age of disinformation, where deep fakes and face filters are more real than the news, the artists in Behind the Cloud question the inequities structurally coded in various technologies. Ultimately, they speak on how code, data, and technology can frame, distort, and contour our physical reality as a system of social control.

WORLD MAPPING (geography, cartography, detention)

In Google Earth, the world is a map of data. In this vast repository of geographic and visual information, it is possible to “visit” almost any place in the world. What feels like informatic freedom for individual users is a corporation’s unquenchable desire to extract and collect data for profit and power. Liliana Farber’s Terram in Aspectu is a series of images depicting fictional islands generated by an algorithm trained on Google Earth. Farber’s images appear glitchy and surreal, depicting small islands and larger land masses that evoke melting bodies or fuzzy, ancestral mirages. In this work, we question our capacity for discernment between the real and the imaginary––in this case, what is generated through machine learning. Farber’s work points to the fallibility of computer vision and machine learning, and how easily susceptible these systems can be to error and bias, even producing fictional outcomes presented as truth.

As Google colonizes the Earth through its relentless surveillance (among other ventures), other tech corporations stake their claim in other spheres. Farber’s work reminds us of that insatiable for-profit appetite that harkens back to the colonial impulse to try to catalog, categorize, and “own” the world. Cartographic obsession is a colonial impulse to control. Maps have always reflected a view of the world that favors those in power. Google does the same. But our relationships with this planet can exist independently from those systems of control. In a poetic gesture, Farber presents us with a tiny screen: To hold, indexing the various shades of blue Google uses to represent oceans, one pixel at a time. This small work is massive in scale: signaling alternative cartographies and worldviews impossible to contain within a single frame.

Although an informatic map can serve as a colonizing instrument, it can also work against existing power structures of subjugation. Dan Paz and Aviva Avnisan’s work, the seeing machine as 440,918,749 points – the view from the Ingham County Youth Detention Center, Lansing, Michigan #3, subverts the panoptic gaze of a carceral surveillance system. Using data collected from 3D lidar scans of the Ingham County Youth Detention Center, their images mark its carceral architectural contours while also drawing attention to the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison-industrial complex. Through this artwork, they reveal the architectural design of structures of incarceration within our communities, often built without our awareness. In this work, what is not usually visible or legible to those outside becomes illuminated. Paz and Avnisan’s intervention turns software against software, confronting the carceral eye with steadfast determination and subverting its hold on those it watches as well as those in surrounding communities. In this profound artistic gesture, over 400 million data points remind us that surveillance structures can be molded and challenged, siphoning power back into the hands of those most affected by the incarceration system.

In another creative act of subversion, Adán De La Garza hides a GoPro camera in his carry-on luggage to secretly record the TSA officers that monitor him in the airport. In my intimate relationship with the tsa, the chaotic background noise of the modern airport mixes with the monotonous labor and distanced gaze of a TSA worker who unzips the artist’s bag and shuffles through his belongings. This is the anatomy of an intimate relationship under the shadow of distrust: an opening, an examination, a coming-to-terms with one’s own doubt, and (sometimes) closure. With this act of dark sousveillance, De La Garza implicates the authoritative watchful eye’s overreach through his own agency––taking power back to mirror the watching that is enacted upon him regardless of individual consent². Further, De La Garza’s hidden camera captures other eyes at work: black, ceiling-mounted dome cameras that punctuate the scene ominously, reminding us of other surveillance systems within the airport including facial recognition customs stations and CT scanners at security checkpoints. In this work, De La Garza points to the omnipresent technologies that attempt to control the flow of bodies transiting through space and turns the camera back on them.

BODY MAPPING (human body, biometric data)

From the onset of time, the classification of the body as data has been a method of social control, empire-building, and a source of visibility and invisibility. However, the body is an amalgamation of constantly evolving experiences and desires that remain elusive to restrictive categories. Situating herself in a specific site of contention, Steffi Faircloth uses the viral phenomenon of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) to destabilize the authority and militarism of the U.S./Mexico border. Fusing humor, satire, and sexuality, Faircloth’s videos insist on the insertion of personal subjectivity, what she calls “bordertown experiences,” into a heavily mediated site of imperial state control. These everyday sensorial zones of walls, checkpoints, and razor wire fencing are fiercely contrasted with the artist’s bodily presence and the heightened audio of ASMR. Due to the surrounding landscape in the background, the typical ASMR feelings of pleasure, goosebumps, and shivers are made unsettling.

Despite the context of the physical sites in which Faircloth films her videos, sexuality is an undeniable undercurrent of these works. On the artist’s Youtube ASMR channel, suggestive titles like “wet mouth + smacking” and “intense licking and slurping” entice viewers algorithmically. Among videos of Faircloth eating popsicles, cucumbers, and mango lollipops, ASMR Elote at the Border and ASMR Border Patrol Checkpoint stand out.³ In both videos, the policing of the border is diffused through sensorial absurdism. The elote carries specific cultural significance and also suggests a phallic reference, while Faircloth’s roleplay of the checkpoint officer teeters between seduction and fear. In these two videos, the implicit sexiness of ASMR is situated in a contested space, reconfiguring passive viewership by transporting us to the militaristic site of the border via platforms like Reddit and Youtube.

Another algorithmically saturated work is Bahareh Khoshooee’s constantly morphing sculpture #EverchangingFacade. This multimedia work takes the shape of a cloud upon which layers of moving images are arranged through projection mapping. Most of these images are collected from the artist’s personal “Explore” page on Instagram, which presents personalized trending content that Meta assumes is relevant to her based on data collected through algorithmic targeting. In previous iterations, Khoshooee’s #EverchangingFacade incorporated makeup trends, fashion tips, and other gendered content rooted in Iranian culture. This most recent iteration of the project includes images from recent protests and civil unrest in Iran following the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini by the Iranian morality police and the fight of the women’s rights movement.⁴ Khoshooee admitted to becoming consumed by these images circulated through Instagram, as they would sometimes be the first images she encountered after waking up in the morning and checking her phone.

Khoshoee’s multimedia project points to the algorithmic targeting of racialized peoples and reflects the fluctuating events of a chaotic globalized world where Iranian content is consumed across various diasporas. #EverchangingFacade also points to the hypocrisies of U.S. immigration policy and the racist principles it sets forth, as well as its obsession with the classification of people under white supremacist hegemony. In this work, the artist visualizes her body as a cloud, or a collection of data often imposed upon her without her consent, from various corporate and state entities.

It felt right for us to place Khoshooee’s multilayered work in spatial and conceptual proximity to Dennis Delgado’s Dark Database, a series that similarly interrogates the racist classification of bodies as data, the overreach of facial recognition surveillance and its inability to “capture” or “process” Black and Brown faces (and therefore, people). Installed across four screens are haunting, blurred faces that illuminate the darkened exhibition space. Each face is an amalgamation of frames pulled from four Hollywood movies depicting Black and Brown people, including Do The Right Thing, Empire, Piñero, and Moonlight. For this series, Delgado trained an Open Computer Vision algorithm to identify the faces of people of color in each film. Similar to other facial recognition software, and the history of photography more broadly, the program has difficulty identifying and “enrolling” faces of color. The resulting composite portraits are ghostly and blurred, reflecting the technology’s inability to capture complexity, thereby reinforcing biased and exclusionary data sets that further codify racism into the system. Delgado’s work reminds us that “images have been one of the primary weapons in reinforcing and opposing social oppression” and photography’s initial development was “as a tool to capture visually and classify human difference;...to construct and solidify existing technologies, namely the ideas of race and assertions [for] empire.”⁵

MOVEMENT MAPPING (diaspora, transit, corporate control)

In Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez’s Gringolandia, personal photographs tell the story of a Puerto Rican family with a history of U.S. military enlistment; familial documents reveal the patterns and social pressures of a society under U.S. colonial “possession” and fiscal control. Roca Gonzalez’s work chronicles the Facetime screenshots, 35mm photos, and other official visual documents that make up a relationship between siblings and extended family across vast geographical distance. In 2017, following the destructive aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Roca Gonzalez began collecting images sent by their brother, Joshua Roca Gonzalez, who was an active U.S. Marine stationed in Camp Pendleton, CA. Over several years, the siblings amassed an archive of photographs that transcends time and space, including images of their grandparents, the tropical landscapes of Puerto Rico, displays of family military memorabilia, and images of active Marine training sites. Arranged in a layered fashion, these intimate, everyday images of various sizes and resolutions reveal how communication infrastructures are ephemeral, fragile, and often temporary, affecting one’s ability to access information and communicate.

Using social media, crowdfunding strategies, and peer-to-peer payment apps to move funds from one group of people to another, RaFia Santana’s multimedia project #PAYBLACKTiME was a radical redistribution of wealth in the form of free Seamless/GrubHub meals for Black and Brown people paid for by white people. Santana used social media as a liberatory and decolonial tool by providing individuals with the needed meal resources, ensuring that one less individual wouldn’t exist hungry. Maximizing on white liberal guilt during the 2016 US election, not only did Santana redistribute wealth and provide aid to individuals in need, she also used technology to establish a narrative of what solidarity and interdependence could look like in a digital world.⁶ Taking action into her own hands, Santana’s work imagines a model for digital reparations, encouraging a radical appropriation of tech platforms to serve the needs and realities of our dystopian present.

Situated near Santana’s ephemera from #PAYBLACKTiME, Michael Menchaca’s large-scale vinyl banner advertises the artist’s forthcoming musical comedy, #WildWildWeb3. Similarly destabilizing the power and validity of Big Tech, Menchaca’s work uses memetic aesthetics and satire to highlight the imperial violence of these corporations and their race to conquer the “unregulated virtual frontier called Web 3.” Prioritizing profit at all costs over the needs of workers, the environment, and the privacy of individuals, Big Tech’s push for flashy AI, cryptocurrency, Web 3, and other new models remind us of the expansionist mindset of Manifest Destiny. In an animated version of the poster, Elon Musk is the central protagonist where he is surrounded by repetitive icons like a computer desktop, mimicking the ways in which we consume media on the internet. #WildWildWeb3 considers how tech companies routinely mine and sell our information to the highest bidder, abstracted as terabytes of data hosted on offshore server farms, mirroring other architectures of incarceration. Layered amongst iconographies of the American West, the Conquest, and modern-day Xicanx symbols, Menchaca compares Musk’s technological expansion into Texas as a contemporary colonial project that occupies and exploits the land and people within it.

Conclusion

In our age of information, corporations and government bodies fuel their empires through data mining and collection to keep tabs on citizens and target them with algorithmic advertising. In divergent ways, the artists in Behind the Cloud examine how these technologies feel omnipresent and an inescapable byproduct of participating in everyday life. They also underscore how these technologies work in tandem with the agendas of corporations, governments, and other systems of control. These artists offer an awareness of the system we exist in, while also encouraging us as viewers to question the visible/invisible systems of control, delve deeper into who controls these systems, and activate our individual and collective responses toward a liberatory existence beyond systems of “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy” that only serve the few.⁷