According to Oxford Dictionaries, a cloud is “a visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere, typically high above the ground”, and cloud computing is described as “computing a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet and used to store, manage, and process data in place of local servers or personal computers: $13 per month gets you 25GB of storage in the cloud.”

The cloud is hard to pinpoint, its very nature nebulous, in all its manifestations it is continually shifting, changing and evolving. It has always been an obsessive idea in the arts and has inspired works by well-known artists and musicians including Claude Debussy, John Constable, Alfred Stieglitz, Rene Magritte and William Eggleston.

Cloud Room (Cloud Mapping Project) is a real-time interactive animation installation and soundscape about the cloud: its significance and history in science and computing, its status as an enduring subject in art and music, and the unforeseen consequences that follow from its utilisation as a tool for surveillance.

Is the value of having technology at our fingertips worth its ability to directly influence and contribute to the growing obsolescence of individual privacy, along with increasing our vulnerability due to the inherent problem of one’s cloud not being managed by oneself and the potential of one’s cloud data falling into the wrong hands?

In Cloud Room, 3D cloud images are downloaded via Google Earth/Sky and or other open source applications in real-time, located by x, y and z coordinates. Cloud formations form at different altitudes, positions in the sky, so this is an aesthetic as well as a scientific and mapping decision. Each of the four walls continually posts surveillance–like cloud images from a specific direction/location (North, South, East and West), juxtaposed with my own cloud images over the years. It will incorporate an atmospheric soundscape and use Tobii eye tracking or other technologies (including specialized eyeglasses), enabling viewers to control the stream of cloud images with their eyes.

Debra Swack is a Fulbright Specialist and a Phi Theta Kappa in computer science who began exhibiting new media and sound art in the early 90s at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto while doing software testing and technical writing for PolyGram Records/Universal Music Group. She is mentioned in Art and Innovation at Xerox Parc published in 1999 by MIT Press and works with immersive and interactive environments. Her most recent article on “the Emotions after Charles Darwin”; an interactive project on the universality of emotions on a biological level regardless of cultural classifications such as race or gender done collaboratively with international neuroscientists was just published in MIT’s Leonardo Electronic Almanac/ Volume 19.