The workshop “Conceptualizing the digital through environmental metaphors” led by Federico Biggio during the XXVII Early Fall School of Semiotics tried to answer the question: What does a cloud mean?
In art history, the cloud often appeared in religious and spiritual contexts. According to Hubert Damisch (Théorie du nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture, 1972, Seuil), the cloud signals the painting's escape from the domain of perspective and its historical transformation, such as in Correggio’s cupolas. In his analysis of La messe du père Cabanuelas (Francisco de Zurbaran, 1638), he noted that the juxtaposition of a cloud and a column emphasizes the contrast between this celestial area and terrestrial space. Moreover, the gazes of the two priests stress this correlation: only the man on the left has this mystical vision because the monk behind him looks at the viewer as if to emphasize that he belongs to our world.
In this regard, it is legitimate to acknowledge a semantic connection between the cloud and the oneiric world. In a figurative sense, we describe a state of distraction as “being on a cloud” or “having one’s head in the clouds”. Moreover, clouds are the realms of pareidolias. As Sue Thomas explained in her book on digital metaphors, clouds draw the eye upwards: towards movement, distance, height; towards the dynamics of space and sky; for most of us, they provoke ideas of transcendence and interiority: when we look up, we lose ourselves.
So, what about cloud computing?
First, cloud representations in digital environments take us back to the watery metaphors which spread across the internet since its birth. Author Bruce Sterling described the Internet in terms of a “bubbling primal soup full of worms and viruses”; Tim O’Reilly thinks of it as an ocean: “The sea is a sustaining medium, most of which is invisible to us and which, like our atmosphere, we largely take for granted. but elements of it occasionally swim within our range of vision”.
The reasons behind this type of conceptualization are manifold: water certainly provides a powerful sense of extent and sublime, and it is the environment where the first major explorations took place.
Workshop participants inquired about this imagery through several trajectories. Some of them found a metaphorical conceptualization in data streams represented as rain flowing from the cloud, from top to bottom. Others look at the juxtaposition of the cloud (software) and the hardware components, often represented within the same image. Others, finally, inquired about the role and representation of the user in cloud computing images: although the hand is the most common body part to be depicted in such a kind of images, image generation with Midjourney revealed that when users are depicted, the image is charged with retro and dreamlike tones, which are absent in other images with a more science fiction character.
Images generated by the participants of the workshop:
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