Songs of the Sky: Photography & the Cloud

What stories does photography tell us about the ”spirit in the sky“ in the digital age? This book looks at the traditional genre of cloudscape painting as a basis for discussing digitization and its consequences. When we think about photography today, we also need to think about the infrastructure that crosslinks and organizes it. Whether we are talking about images from surveillance cameras or satellites, digitized archival images or holiday shots on our smartphones, all these pictures are now stored as digital data in the cloud and processed by AI. In the dialogue between historical photographs and current works, the exhibition catalogue covers a wide arc ranging from the first depictions of clouds in photography to the global impact of cloud computing technology. The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and C/O Berlin Friends.

Authors: James Bridle, Ingrid Burrington, Orit Halpern, Nicolas Malevé, Florian Sprenger, Kathrin Schönegg, and Eva Wilson

With works by: Claudia Angelmaier, Sylvia Ballhause, Marie Clerel, Raphaël Dallaporta, Fragmentin, Noémie Goudal, Louis Henderson, Noa Jansma, Stefan Karrer, Almut Linde, Lisa Oppenheim, Trevor Paglen, Meghann Riepenhoff, Simon Roberts, Evan Roth, Mario Santamaría, Adrian Sauer, Andy Sewell, Shinseungback Kimyonghun, Louis Vignes, and Charles Nègre

Kathrin Schönegg is a historian of photography working as curator at C/O Berlin.

DESIGNER: Naroska