FROM CLOUD TO CROWD POSTER CAMPAIGN

Saturday 5th November 2022 - Saturday 17th December 2022, Slessor Garden Dundee

In collaboration with artists Batool Desouky and Cristina Cochior, NEoN and The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) presented a call to action, ‘From Cloud to Crowd’. This campaign was part of the Trans*Feminist Counter Cloud Action Plan by TITiPI and infused the NEoN programme at irregular moments, with a continuing commitment between 2022-2027. The aim of the plan is to:

-Bring communities together internationally to refuse the takeover of our institutions' resources by Big Tech
-To reimagine relationships with "the cloud" and to dream of community and collective infrastructures (some of which might be digital!)
-To make the conditions for taking care of descent and dissent from the cloud whilst partying in the ruins of Big Tech

The 18 large posters, designed by Batool Desouky and Cristina Cochior, were digitally printed and displayed near the riverfront in Dundee. The posters were formed by different formulas entered on a spreadsheet mixing earth, water and sky. They propose to dissent from the land and extractive resource grabbing of Big Tech into an imagination of grounded infrastructures which remake our elemental relations.

Designed with inky blues, browns and greens, the spreadsheets become a different type of computational record keeping or plotting, each cell notated, from which slogans and poetry call the passerby. In a city where at every turn you are greeted with an advertisement for yet another Big Tech solution, instead, the spreadsheet pixels welcome a more tender relationship with the world as if blown in on the wind from the river Tay. Reminiscent of Dionne Brand's line in the Blue Clerk, keeping "account of cubic meters of senses, perceptions and resistant facts". And together, the glittering cells display slogans, statements and questions that show a commitment to cloud resistance, computational regeneration, community maintenance, and collective transformations.

The slogans were inspired by, gleaned, borrowed and iterated from various sources and situations: Lumbung Glossary, TITiPI, Other Weapons, Varia, Miranda Moss, Malé Luján Escalante, Tobias Fiebig, Charlotte Eifler, Dick Reckard, The Underground Division, Lauren Berlant, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ren Britton, Mary Nardini Gang.

The software used to make the posters is LibreOffice Calc. This work exists in the comradeship of other spreadsheet artists and peers, such as Karl Moubarak, Suzin Kwon and To Be Determined (with the work Comfort People Safety Curtain). The posters are available here for reuse under the conditions of the CC4r.

About the Artists

Batool Desouky is an artist working with computation and the history of magic. They have presented their work as part of Toppling, SET Woolwich, London (2022), In-grid Real Bodies, Corsica Studios, London (2022), Dreaming Reconstructions, and The Feminist Library, London (2021).

Cristina Cochior is working with collective infrastructures She is a member of the everyday technology collective Varia, as well as a tutor in the Hacking Department of the Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam and in the Experimental Publishing Department of the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. TITiPI functions as an infrastructure to establish new ways in which socio-technical practices and technologies might support the public interest.