Forming a Nomadic Artwork
that Lives in the Public

Download PDF description of the Unknown Cloud Series

[https://unknowncloud.com/ https://unknowncloud.com/]]

Current research project

Two works currently feature in the Unknown Cloud Series: Unknown Cloud on Its Way to... and Unknown Cloud Forming.

The idea of Unknown Cloud is a manifestation of a radical slow process. Since 2013, it has been forming outside of the governance of institutions and disciplines, constantly mutating alongside the friction of political, technological & environmental climates.

The form of the Cloud allows large groups of people to converge outdoors and take part in a collective experience of radically transforming and repurposing the use of everyday technologies.

Although the technology used for the event has some universal traits from an anthropocentric perspective, the collective behaviour from the people participating never operates in the same way. Each local cloud forms its own culture with unique knowledge systems - with its own ways of sensing and ordering experience - hence the unknown nature of its outcome.

From 2021 onwards Untold Garden (Jakob Skote & Max Celar) have joined artist duo Lundahl & Seitl as co-artist. Collaborators include experimental composer Hara Alonso & dramaturge Rachel Alexander.

Programmed to evolve globally until 2057 as both a myth and a real, live phenomenon, the Unknown Cloud has appeared over large cities, remote villages, across national borders and international sea space.

Unknown Cloud Forming synchronizes the movement of bodies near and far, by bringing people together within a limited time window, often at dusk. With a free App downloaded on their phones, Cloud followers are directed to gather in local flash-mobs on a square, a green area in the city, on top of a hill or in the forest,whereupon they make a collective effort to draw both each other and the Cloud towards them. As soon as the experience starts, their devices cease to be smartphones. The screens go black and they gradually transition from an individual into a collective experience. The smartphone becomes a bi-directional sensory extension to the body – a wand or a sacred object that enables you to experience the otherwise intangible world of the unknown cloud.

Preceded by a rumor to act as an amplifier of one’s senses, the Cloud has an ability to create a portal between your individual present self and the life worlds of superorganisms and other-than-human timescales. Gradually the Cloud makes them transition from an individual to a collective experience.

Faced with the contradiction to imagine something that is already there, but cannot be perceived with their senses, Cloud followers are drawn into an interdependent collaboration to form the cloud. Like a superorganism spread out beyond the borders of their own body, they begin to listen with their hands, to hear from the position of another person’s body. They are nudged into forming a larger constellation of bodies, to be used as an amplifier, to collectively hear traces of our civilisation: radio communication floating through the air, and the invisible communication signals from the mycelium web, the last surviving non-human creature on Earth, underground.

By placing the “sensor’’ onto their own and other bodies to listen for their murmur, they encounter the universe’s own fossils: neutrinos. Neutrinos carry fossilized messages from the universe’s remote past: the radio astronomical sound of the sun, the background radiation of the beginning. Like the dynamic structure of glacial ice, the deeper you look or listen, the deeper you travel into the cloud, the further back into the Earth’s geological past you reach. Ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Ice has a memory: trapped air gets squeezed into tiny bubbles, each a record of the atmosphere, each data, collected and kept for millennia. When, as a group, you collaborate to attract the cloud, you become able to collectively pass through the memory of the Earth’s deep past. Some memories will remain as fossils and others will evaporate forever into air, in parallel with the ongoing melting of glaciers globally.

When encountering a cloud event, it remains uncertain if the cloud is a ritual to generate change or a contemporary ritual of burial. The appearance of the cloud changes the acoustic reverb in the visitors’ headphones. Like a glacier, the cloud appears to have a climate of its own. The light from smartphone screens colour the haze blue, like aged ice, as an interlude to the impending time compression, the cold memory of the earth.

Unknown Cloud Forming, 2022 is a collaboration between Untold Garden (Jakob Skote & Max Celar), Lundahl & Seitl, experimental composer, Hara Alonso, & Dramaturge, Rachel Alexander. Untold Garden (Jakob Skote & Max Celar) joined artist duo Lundahl & Seitl as co-artist on the Unknown Cloud in 2021.

As part of our contribution to the Exhibition: Limits of Knowing at Gropius Bau, in 2017 when the Unknown Cloud, in its infancy, was on its way to the old airfield Tempelhofer Feld, we commissioned a series of texts that were published in the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel.

Here is one from DHARAMSING TERON an independent indigenous research activist from the Karbi community in the tribal region of Karbi Anglong in central Assam, India.

More articles on Unknown Cloud

Unknown Cloud Forming Credits:

Lundahl & Seitl and Untold Garden (Jakob Skote and Max Čelar) in collaboration with Rachel Alexander and Hara Alonso.
Producer: Emma Ward
Earlier iterations of the Unknown Cloud were commissioned and co-produced by Berliner Festspiele Immersion & Accelerator
Lundahl & Seitl are supported by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the International Program for Visual Artists (iaspis), Stockholm Stad and Kulturrådet Sweden / Swedish Arts Council.

Unknown Cloud on Its Way Credits:

Medium: Multiple location flashmob synchronized by iOS/Android application, social & news media, 360 ambisonic sound, text-messages and the website: http://unknowncloud.com Duration: 35min.
Unknown Cloud Caretaker was developed on the Geo Intel platform: Nagoon for iOS and Android.
Anthropologist: Erika Tanos (Curiosityshop)
Dramaturge & Co-Script writer: Rachel Alexander
Content strategist: Anna J Ljungmark (House of Real)
Video production: Joakim Olsson
Associate researcher: Ronald Jones (RCA, London)
Website: Development: Troels Ljung (workingimage.dk)
Design: Nandi Nobell
R&D Script writer: Alex Bäckström.
Producer: Emma Ward